Partner Brief
PARTNER BRIEF
This document outlines the business plan, roadmap, and partnership layout.
Summary
Below is a high level summary of the business definitions.
Mission
Help SMBs reliably acquire customers through Google ads and other marketing channels without chaos.
Main Objectives
AdPillar is the foundation and starting point for our partnership journey which can lead to further projects or businesses. It's important that we offer good services, good support while systemizing and automating our business processes to make it hands free and create value for potential sale.
Service & Support
- Vet customers to make sure they're a good fit for our services and that we can deliver positive results
- Implement repeatable systems that can generate good results
- Offer a personal touch with dedicated account managers or sales representatives to keep in constant contact with our clients make sure they feel great about working with us
- Offer reports or a dashboard that's straight to the point and easy to understand (focus on results not just metrics)
- Have a quick and easy support system that resolves clients issues quickly and efficiently
Systemization
- Create an organizational structure that uses roles to delegate permissions and tasks to staff members
- Create a master playbook that documents all operations, workflows, and tasks to achieve specific results for each aspect of the business
- This will enable our business to scale and make sale of the business easier if we choose to go down that path
Automation
- Discover and use existing tools to simplify and expedite fulfillment, sales, and support.
- Develop our own in-house tools (proprietary) to simplify and expedite processes
- Create our own AI automations (proprietary) to reduce labour burden and speed up processes
Future Possibilities
- Throughout our development process we will discover ways of automating and simplifying different aspects of the marketing process which we can use to develop a SaaS tool for marketing
Services & Release
Services will be rolled out in phases. It's possible that not all phases will be rolled out depending on the success of the previous phase. We don't want to offer too many services and create complicated internal procedures and workflows if it's not necessary.
Google Ads
Initial PriorityShortlist
- Paid advertising on Google is very popular and highly in demand
- It's fairly easy to get into and systemize
- It's fairly easy to find staff that have experience with some sort of Google advertising
- Most of the labour is in the setup of the campaigns but ongoing management doesn't have a big drain on resources
- In the beginning the Google ads will mostly be targeted towards service based industries because it's easier to set up compared to e-commerce which has more complicated analytics
Google Business Profile
Second PriorityShortlist
- This is a good companion to Google Ads
- It's very easy to setup, fulfill, and systemize
- Most of the labour burden is in the setup and ongoing maintenance is relatively simple
- This could lead into other service opportunities such as managing Google Reviews and keeping their profiles up to date however this maintenance work can be farmed out or automated if we choose to go down this path
- Dashboard analytics will be quick and easy to at as there isn't too much complexity
ChatGPT
Second PriorityShortlist
- OpenAI is going to start offering paid marketing to offset their operating costs very shortly
- We would be early adopters for this marketing service making it a very easy entry to market
- Complexity or labour requirements is unknown at this time
Microsoft Ads
Third PriorityShortlist
- This is a good companion to Google Ads
- Marketing steps are similar to Google but will require some adaption
- Easy to add this to our dashboard as the majority of the changes will likely be on the API side
- Microsoft has a different user base which can help increase results for specific industries
- Finding staff for fulfillment should be relatively easy
Google Local Marketing
Third Priority
- This is lesser known by many people and is a good market to tap in to
- It has some cool wow features that clients may like as none of their competitors are like we using them
- Basic fulfillment is pretty easy and more advanced setups are not that difficult but require a little bit of a learning curve
- May have less returns which is why it's prioritized in 3rd stage
- The analytics are a little bit more complicated because many of the conversions will happen from booking systems or we'll use a different analytic system as compared to Google ads
Third Priority
- LinkedIn marketing is highly desired for businesses
- Marketing strategies are completely different than Google ads And will require additional work to discover the most effective marketing strategies which is why it's lower on the priority scale
- There will also be some kind of initial setup to build the reputation of the brand before doing any paid marketing which requires additional skills and labour
- This falls quite a bit outside of our service scope so we may decide to release this under a different company
Meta (FB & IG)
Lowest Priority
- Open the market to a different customer base for AdPillar
- There is a bit of setup that's required with this before we can run successful ad campaigns so the labour burden can be pretty high or we will need to pair it with a management service as well which could be a good upsell if we release the service under a different company specializing in social media marketing
Other
Some other services that are possible to offer under the AdPillar brand include:
- Google Display Network
- YouTube Ads
- Amazon Ads (PPC, Prime, Video, etc..)
- Spotify Ads
- AdRoll (Display ads)
- Private ad space brokerage
- Canada Post marketing
- Newspaper advertising
- Event advertising
- Magazine advertising
Ideal Customer
We will need to be selective as to what customers we work with:
- Avoid low cost, tire kickers, or DIY clients as they can cause more headaches
- Stick with service based industries (for our startup) that have high cash flow and where there is a strong demand for the services offered
- Businesses who have high seasonal sales
- Mom and pop shops who don't have experience with marketing but want some kind of online marketing presence
- Customers who don't have the time to manage it themselves
Our ideal customers will have an ad spend between:
$2,500 - $5000
- Easier to setup and manage (low labour burden)
- Reasonable budget to expect good results (clients are satisfied)
- Clients are outside of the cheap marketing mentality and understand it takes money to make money
- Reasonable monthly income of $1,200 makes it worthwhile to deal with customers
$25,000 - $50,000
- Higher monthly income $2,500 + percentage of ad spend between $2,250 - $7,500 ($4,750 - $10,000)
- Huge potential for additional service/feature upselling
- Budget allows testing of micro campaigns meaning we don't need to over optimize the setup
- Usually have a year round marketing need so it's not
Exclusions
We will not be offering the following services:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Too much labour
- Requires a lot of ongoing maintenance
- Slow results
- Social Media Management
- Lots of setup and hours to manage
- Requires a lot of creative skill that is hard to find in the labour market
- Customers often have a difference in opinion pertaining to the content and strategy used in their feeds
- Additional support burden if we offer reply management
- Lots of cheap competitors
- Source media is often difficult to obtain from customers (they want a miracle worker)
- Results are hard to quantify and often meaningless without sales
- Branding Projects
We can create another company to offer these services in the future, or team up with other businesses/freelancers already offering these services to complement our offering and exchange work.
Partners
To launch this business we will need the following skills (ideally one partner specialized per skill).
Technical
- Researching and designing systems that will be used by the customers and staff
- Build out and support of websites and web apps
- Research, collaboration, and implementation of automations and AI to optimize SOP
- Implementation of tools and systems
- Service fulfillment
Sales
- Defining sales offerings, packages, and pricing
- Creating onboarding flows and documentation for customers
- Branding (image/voice and positioning, social media)
- Customer support (non-technical, front facing - single point of contact - representative)
- Marketing research for initial reachout
- Converting leads into sales
Operations
- Developing Standard Operating Procedures and workflows
- Implementation of tools and systems
- Service fulfillment
- ERP build out
Partnership roles need to be refined.
Partners will hold at least one weekly meeting (online or in person 30 mintues) to summarize progress and next steps.
Roadmap
Below is a rough roadmap with scopes assigned to each of the proposed partners
T Technical Partner
S Sales Partner
O Operations Partner
Definition
- Offer scope (what we do/don't do) T S O
- Initial service list T S O
- Pricing model T S O
- Target customer T S O
- Define launch ready criteria T S O
Brand & Positioning
- Business name T S O
- Logo + brand kit T S O
- Messaging/positioning S
- Refine pricing based on positioning S
- Decide primary channel(s) for early acquisition S O
Sales, Systems, Website
- Sales process (pipeline/workflow) S O
- Sales assets (pitch decks, proposals, onboarding docs/videos, FAQ, objection handling) S
- Discover & shortlist core tools (ERP, CRM, billing, e-mail/ticket system) T S O
- Website development (planning, pages, content, design, build out, lead capture) T S O
- Define internal roles & handoff (preplan for SOP - who does what) T S O
Fulfillment, Dashboard, Ops
- Fulfillment workflows O
- Start SOP O
- Dashboard development (planning, interfaces, data sets and sources, build out) T S O
- Support workflows S O
- Sales workflows S O
- Tool discovery, documentation, implementation (internal) T S O
Review & Adjust
- Website T S O
- Dashboard T S O
- SOP T S O
- Sales asset T S O
Pre Launch
- Dashboard documentation T
- Marketing plan S O
- Fulfillment tool implementation T O
- Billing system, ERP, CRM implementation T O
- Update internal documentation (employee manuals) T S O
- Dry run/test client T S O
Launch
- Outreach/lead generation (marketing campaigns, past customer outreach, social, etc..) S O
- Onboarding first clients using the system S O
- Fix gaps as they appear (Website, SOP, tools, reporting) T S O
Post Launch
- Hiring staff to scale business operations T S O
- Refine SOP O
- Collaborate on automations T S O
- Implement automations/AI T
- Decide next service additions T S O