Process, pricing and quantifying results

Let’s take a transparent look at each of the following:

  • Our process
  • How we price our services during each step of our process
  • How we quantify success and what results you should expect

Our process and pricing

We implement our services within an intentionally designed and chronological, four-step framework, as follows:

Under the assumption that our team at Gorilla is implementing a full-scale program for you, we recommend budgeting $12-15K+/month in agency fees (plus an additional $5-10K+/month in media once campaigns begin running). In some cases, we’ll limit our role to coaching/consulting, and our fees will be much lower in these scenarios. It just means that you’ll do all the hard work, while we guide you, upskill your marketing team as needed and help you become self sustaining.

We like to eliminate as many barriers as possible to getting started, so each of the four parts of our framework can be implemented one step at a time, and at the right pace for your organization. Our only rule is that we start at the beginning and proceed sequentially.

Here are more details about each of the four steps:

1. Road Map

$15K total
One-month implementation

We begin all new client engagements with a strategy project that starts with discovery and culminates in the delivery of an actionable marketing plan.

Our job with your Road Map is to identify the business outcome you need to achieve (example: grow revenue from $25M to $30M over the next 12 months) and reverse engineer the marketing program to get you there.

This project includes a half-day workshop with your CEO/president/owner, head of sales, head of marketing (if applicable) and a few key sales professionals or sales engineers who deeply understand your customer. We learn everything we can about your products/services, audience segments, key buying-process influencers, sales/marketing history and competitive landscape.

Then we take three weeks to supplement what we’ve learned with research. We’ll look at the size of your total addressable market and how we can most effectively reach them, document our recommended strategy and outline the action plan that will get you to the outcome you’re seeking.

At the end of this project, you’ll have everything you need to launch into implementation, with or without our help.

2. Go-to-Market Messaging

$25K total
Two-month implementation

The first step in implementation (95% of the time) focuses on getting the messaging right.

We’ll start with customer research, interviewing a selection of your existing customers that represent the type you want to replicate. We’re looking to understand what matters the most to these exact individuals. We’ll uncover new insights, validate or challenge what you believe to be true and identify common threads that will inform how you go to market with the right message for the right people.

Following these customer interviews, we’ll reconvene with you and lead an initiative to craft both a concise “who we help and how” one-sheeter and a more in-depth brand narrative that illustrates how you create value and differentiate yourself in a very customer-centric way.

Finally, we’ll map out your content strategy (what specific written, video or other content needs to be created to surround your messaging) as well as a campaign map that documents which content distribution channels (and specific campaigns) will drive the outcomes you’re looking to achieve.

3. Essential Content

$25-50K total
Three-to-four-month implementation

With a documented marketing plan, customer interviews, messaging, content strategy and campaign map behind you, it’s time to physically create the content you’ll need to go to market.

Our content team (writers and videographer) spend their days talking to engineers and technical professionals to harvest what’s in their brains, extract that knowledge and turn it into content that will speak to the things we’ve learned matter most to the people with the job titles inside of the companies you need to reach and influence.

Your content will likely include a mixture of thought leadership blog posts, product/service pages or other website copy refinements, case studies, expert explainer videos and landing pages.

4. Ongoing Campaigns, Content, Strategy Calls and Reporting

$12K+/month in Gorilla 76 fees
$5-10K+/month in media fees (Google, LinkedIn, Facebook)
Ongoing implementation (recommended for no less than six months)

Imagine opening a brand new restaurant in your town with a stellar chef, a spectacular environment and the best service around… but it sat on a side street off the main drag, and you did nothing to build awareness for it.

In this step, it’s time to generate serious brand awareness at scale, while simultaneously doing the work to drive RFQs.

Our job at this stage is to proactively deliver the messaging and content you’ve created to as much of your total addressable market as possible, at the right frequency and in the places where they already spend time.

We’ll run two complementary campaign strategies for you side by side during this phase:

  1. Capture demand
  2. Create demand

Capture demand campaigns focus on the (typically small) percentage of your audience that’s actively in market, looking for a solution right now. In short, these are your audience members who are in buying mode at this moment in time and we need to make sure they find and contact you.

Create demand campaigns, on the other hand, focus on proactively reaching the tens of thousands of people who fit your ideal customer profile (the right job titles from the right companies in the right geographies, etc) regardless of where they currently are in the buyer’s journey. We’ll put all the content and messaging we’ve created so far to use in campaigns that will demonstrate thought leadership, answer common questions, illustrate success stories and prompt RFQs. Bit by bit, as your individual audience members enter a buy cycle, you’ll reap the benefits of having built brand awareness at scale in your niche market.

Although we recommend running campaigns for no less than six months to realize a positive ROI, you can stop whenever you’d like with 30-days notice.

But if we’re doing our job right, we’re confident you’ll only want to invest more.

What “results” means (and what you can expect)

Marketing-sourced pipeline is the north star success metric we use with our clients.

In other words, our job is to help you measurably scale quoted business with the right types of customers.

Metrics like search engine rankings, website traffic, leads and even sales-qualified leads are marketing KPIs – not business outcomes.

We’ll absolutely use those sorts of metrics as barometers to help us understand if we’re moving in the right direction. But delivering marketing-sourced pipeline is how we expect to be evaluated.

How we go about reporting

We’ll need your help here too, because without the right inputs, we can’t document meaningful outputs.

Our crew is well-versed in Hubspot and Salesforce (and we’ve worked in plenty of other CRMs and marketing automation systems as well).

We’ll help you configure your tech stack for full-funnel visibility that will let us report all the way from first touch through to PO. And with that right tech stack in place, we can slice and dice the data in all kinds of ways that not only illustrate impact, but let us make adjustments as we go to refine the effectiveness of your marketing program.

When you should expect to see results

By the end of month five (two months into campaigning, per the timeline graphic above), we usually begin seeing leading signals (marketing KPIs) that tell us the program is working.

And typically by month eight or nine (five to six months into campaigning), you’ll start to see a meaningful uptick in quoted business with the right companies.

Of course many variables come into play from one client to the next, including:

  • Size of your audience
  • Price point of your product or service
  • Length of your sales cycle from first touch to PO
  • Existing brand awareness in your space (or lack thereof)
  • Size (and visibility) of your competitive set
  • Level of investment in your media buy (which directly correlates with reach and frequency of messaging and content delivery)

Where to go next?

If you think there could potentially be a fit and would like to talk, we encourage you to book a strategy call.

And if you haven’t yet, consider looking at our Who We Help and How page, some of our Case Studies and our three media platforms: