If you come to FSM and tell us you need Google Ads, there’s a pretty good chance our first question won’t be about Google Ads – it’ll probably be something more like: “How do you see Google advertising moving the needle for your business?”
This question is at the heart of the first step in our marketing process: Learn. Before we get to building anything, before we activate a marketing campaign, and before we can start looking at results in order to adapt our approach, we need to understand what we’re actually trying to accomplish.
That’s why most new relationships at Full Spectrum Marketing begin with the Needs Assessment.
A Needs Assessment is a simple conversation that helps our team understand your organization, goals, audience, challenges, opportunities, and – most importantly – the business problem you’re actually trying to solve.
Because sometimes you need Google Ads, and sometimes you think you need Google Ads, and it’s our job to help figure out what the right path forward looks like.
Every Strong Marketing Strategy Starts With a Clear Understanding of Your Business
One of the most common entry points to marketing conversations comes from a thought process we call “buying tactically.” You know you need more customers. You know SEO helps people find businesses online. Therefore, you decide you need SEO.
That way of thinking isn’t necessarily wrong, but many times there’s a more valuable tactic that gets to the heart of the outcome you’re looking for in a more cost-effective way. It’s our job to navigate this.
We need to understand what kind of customers you have – but also – the customers you want to have. We need to know which products or services can provide the most growth or profit for your business. We need to understand how much a new customer is worth, why customers choose you, who you’re competing against, where your biggest opportunities are and what’s stopping you from capturing those opportunities already.
That’s because we don’t want to start with the marketing tactic. That might take us down the wrong road. Instead, we want to start with the outcome and then work backwards. That’s the purpose of the Learn phase of our “Learn. Build. Activate. Adapt.” process. The more clearly we understand your destination, the better we can assemble the right navigation settings to get you there.
What Happens During a Marketing Needs Assessment?
An FSM Needs Assessment is typically a conversation between your team and several key members of ours. Usually myself (Andrew, AKA el Presidente), Amy our COO (because if you want things done right, you need high-caliber operations and execution), and sometimes another expert from our team depending on the types of tactics you already have in mind (think Caleb – our Web Operations Manager if you need a website, or Julie – our Director of Marketing if you’re looking for growth-oriented advertising campaigns.)
Something we often say is that “every client is unique, and every client is interesting.” Therefore, we don’t systematically run through a rigid questionnaire from beginning to end, because every organization is different.
So instead, we lead you through a casual conversation. You don’t feel like we’re asking predictable questions, and that’s because we’re genuinely curious and interested in what makes your business tick.
Then we ask questions about your answers. And then those answers usually create even more questions. This is how my favorite core value – Furiosity – really comes into play.
Furiosity is our word for “furious curiosity.” It’s our relentless interest in your organization matched with our drive to make you win.
We might start with questions like:
- What is the biggest challenge you’re trying to solve? How did this challenge arrive?
- Which services do you want to focus on, and why? Why not the others?
- What are your current customers like? Is that the same or different from the customers you want to have?
- Why do your best customers choose you instead of someone else? Who are those competitors they compare you against?
What marketing have you tried before? - What worked? What didn’t?
- Have you used an agency before? What was that experience like? What are the ways you expect us to be different?
- If we’re successful, what are some of the changes in your business that you can feel? What kinds of things might we track to help measure that feeling?
As you can see, the most valuable questions usually aren’t the ones we walked into the room planning to ask; they’re the follow-up questions.
You may mention that one particular service is significantly more profitable than another. We’re curious about why.
You may tell us your best customers almost always come from a certain industry. Now we’re curious about the things that make those customers different.
You may tell us you tried a particular marketing tactic before and it didn’t work. We’re curious about how that tactic was implemented before we decide the tactic itself was the problem.
That’s our Furiosity at work. We’re trying to uncover the little pieces of information that help us understand the bigger picture.
By the end of a Needs Assessment, we want to understand your organization well enough that we can clearly articulate what you’re trying to accomplish, what’s standing in the way, where the opportunities are, and what role marketing can realistically play in getting you there. That’s when we’re ready to start building.
How Full Spectrum Marketing Uses What We Learn in the Needs Assessment
Once the Needs Assessment is complete, we take everything we’ve learned back to the smart people at FSM so the puzzle-solving can begin.
Now we know a bunch of things about you. We know the outcome we’re trying to create. We know the audience we’re trying to reach. We know the challenges standing in the way. We understand the available budget and resources. Our next job is to determine which combination of marketing efforts gives us the best opportunity to reach that goal.
Because FSM is a full-service marketing agency, we have a pretty big toolbox. We can recommend paid advertising, traditional SEO, AI SEO, content marketing, website improvements – or entire new websites, landing pages, brand development, design, social media, email campaigns, and plenty more.
But having access to all those tactics doesn’t mean we should use all of them. In actuality, a good strategy is often defined just as much by what we don’t recommend.
If SEO isn’t the best way to solve the problem, we shouldn’t recommend SEO. If your website isn’t ready to convert the traffic an advertising campaign would generate, maybe we need to fix that first and recommend a landing page. If you have a strong website and a highly defined audience that’s actively searching for exactly what you provide, maybe paid search deserves a larger portion of the investment.
Or maybe the Needs Assessment uncovers an entirely different opportunity than the one that originally brought you to us. Now we’re focusing on the thing that really moves the needle – not something that would otherwise waste your investment.
That’s why we “Learn” before we “Build.”
The Needs Assessment gives our team the information they need to turn marketing from a collection of tactics into an intentional plan. From there, we Build the strategy and the tools necessary to execute it, we Activate those efforts in the market, and then we measure what’s happening and Adapt the strategy based on the insights we discover.
Learning isn’t something we do once at the beginning of a relationship. It’s the foundation for everything that comes afterward.
Start the Conversation With Full Spectrum Marketing
The good news is, with FSM you don’t need to know exactly what kind of marketing you need before talking to us. Come to us with the challenge, and we figure out the rest.
Maybe you need more leads. Maybe you’re launching a new product. Maybe you’re struggling to reach a particular audience. Maybe your competitors are showing up everywhere and you’re wondering why you’re not. Maybe your website isn’t generating business. Or maybe you simply know your organization needs to grow and you’re not sure what marketing can realistically do to help.
That’s enough to get started. We’ll bring the questions, apply Furiosity, learn everything we can, then we’ll build a plan designed to solve it.
