What can I expect during the first few months with USDP?

months of partnership with USDP

With lots of options out there, choosing a marketing partner is no small task. If you’re considering a partnership with USDP through a Managed Service Agreement, the following overview will shed some light on our workflow.

Disclaimer: This is a loose timeline for what to expect when you hire us as your digital marketing team. With decades of experience, our team can run your entire marketing strategy, but not all of our Managed Service Agreements are the same. If you are signing on with USDP specifically for a full website build or redesign, the timeline will be slightly different. Check out our website service page for more details on website projects.

Your First 30-60 Days

The first few weeks working with USDP are a crash course in who you are, what your pain points are, and what we’re excited to do for you. But, it all starts with a simple conversation.

Booking your discovery meeting

When you set up a meeting with one of our client leaders you’ll learn more about our services and we’ll get to know you too. If you’re local to Cincinnati, you can meet the team in our office or we’ll come to yours. If you’re further away, a Zoom call works.

Ahead of our initial meeting, we’ll send you a scoping guide with some questions and price ranges to think about. This first discovery meeting allows us to diagnose your digital marketing needs. We want to hear all about your marketing history and your short and long-term goals.

Once we’ve learned enough to create a proposal, we’ll put together a statement of work and present it to you in a follow-up meeting. Once we agree on a scope of work (SOW) and a budget, we’ll get started!

Building your marketing roadmap

The marketing roadmap is an integral component to any good digital marketing strategy. It’s a strategy that’s tailored to your goals and your industry. But, what does it entail?

A roadmap helps us understand your starting point, your audience, and where you stand in the market. We’ll focus on mapping out where you’re trying to go and what metrics you want your business to reach. It’s also wise to take a look at the competition and see what others in your industry are doing. With clarity on the basics of your past and present, we’ll look toward a plan for the future.

Answering some of the following questions will help you get a baseline read on your digital marketing health.

  • How have you been working toward your marketing goals?
  • What have you tried that’s worked and what hasn’t?
  • What has been in the way of you reaching your goals?
  • Do you want to expand your audience?
  • Do you want to refresh your brand?
  • What tactics will bring about results?
  • When should you implement these different strategies?
  • How should you spend your budget?
  • What can you do and what should you outsource?

This process may start in the first month but can also overlap with the second month.

Accessing your accounts and setting up performance marketing

You may already have a robust online presence including social media accounts, ad accounts, and your website. If a past agency still owns the access, or if it’s in-house, we’ll work on getting our own access and troubleshooting any issues. It’s important that we’re able to view the backend and clean up problems that may be festering under the surface.

We’ll look at how your ads have been performing and gather pertinent data to help inform our next steps. We’ll analyze that data and meet with you to strategize about next steps for building paid search campaigns that get you in front of customers.

60-90 Days In

By the second and third month, our partnership is in full swing. We’ve gotten to know you well and we understand your company’s goals. We’ve started collaborating with you on projects you want to prioritize and we’ve set a cadence of weekly or bi-monthly meetings to receive your feedback.

It’s time to dive a little deeper on your digital marketing strategy.

Refining Your Messaging

If you have a solid messaging framework, great! If not, we can help. Even existing messaging frameworks need a refresh every so often. If messaging is part of your SOW, we’ll set up more discovery sessions. We’ll interview your leadership, your team members, and key stakeholders about your core mission and what makes your business tick.

Building a comprehensive messaging guide using a story-driven approach will allow us to create a memorable narrative with your customers at the center. The process aligns your team and helps everyone use the same language, so your brand is clearer than ever.

Bolstering Your Brand

Now that we’ve gotten familiar with your business, a brand refresh could be in order. Sometimes, brands can get ignored or neglected, but they are an integral component of a good digital marketing strategy.

A quality brand will stand out, create a strong connection with your audience, and allow your ethos to shine. New logos, colors, fonts, and designs are all part of a refresh. Beyond the digital space, we can help with business cards, letterheads, and other essential collateral that make every interaction look sharp.

This process can also start at a different point, like the messaging project, depending on your needs and SOW.

Engaging with Your audience

If content creation is part of your SOW but you haven’t been using your email database or updating your website, we’ll change that.

Our writers will use the initial discovery meetings with your leadership and the messaging framework to start building out your content map and content strategy. We’ll create blogs, emails, social media posts, LinkedIn articles, video scripts, and more, all in the voice and tone of your business.

Cleaning up your SEO and AI optimization

SEO is essential for a healthy online presence. Investing in an honest SEO/AIO assessment is the best way to understand your baseline and set actionable goals for improvement. It’s also wise to optimize existing content for better search results. After optimizing your site, we’ll strategize about what new content topics will both resonate with your audience and show up well in search engines.

Launching your digital ads

Performance marketing results take time, so it’s wise to start as early as you can. Our digital advertising services will allow your online presence to get the visibility it deserves. We’ll work with you on search ads, programmatic ads, display ads, and SEO to help you get noticed without overspending. Your targeted ad campaigns will create a strategic digital sales funnel that keeps business booming.

Your 90 - 120 Day Benchmarks

90 days in, you can start to look back and understand how all the pieces are working together. Digital marketing takes time, and it’s a lot more like physical therapy than one-time plastic surgery. Steady improvements form a better foundation for your marketing efforts than fast, flashy campaigns that may or may not stick.

Performance marketing results

If you begin performance marketing work right away, by the third month you’ll likely start to see some results.

Our digital sales funnel thrives on data, which is your greatest asset. Each month we analyze the data we collect from all angles to learn more about your audience, optimize your website for performance, and adjust strategies to maximize your investment. The focus is on engaging and retaining customers.

SEO and content Results

With cleaner SEO across your site and a flow of optimized content being uploaded, you may be getting more leads that are better quality. Well-written content will do wonders for your website and brand, and your customers will start noticing your commitment to digital marketing. With SEO and content, patience is key. A few months of diligent work will transform your marketing strategy.

What’s next?

With increased engagement from weekly digital marketing work, you’re well on your way to a great strategy that yields results.

This process takes place over weeks, months, and even years. As algorithms and platforms evolve and new technology like AI shakes up the industry, there’s always more to learn and ways to improve. Luckily, working with USDP, you have a team of professionals to tackle the changes and keep you on the right path.

As you continue in your marketing journey, consider expanding your strategy to include more video projects, different advertising approaches, a website redesign, an eCommerce site, and more. The possibilities are endless!

If you’re looking to partner with USDP for all this and more, set up a call with one of our client leaders.

For more information about how USDP works, check out our FAQ page.