The Craze Process: What to Expect When Working With Craze

Working with a new marketing agency can be an intimidating process. You have deadlines to hit and goals to achieve, and bringing on a fresh, new partner can be just as scary as it is exciting.

We’ve all been there. To help ease the nerves, though, I thought it might be helpful to lay out exactly what you can expect when you partner with Craze.

Onboarding

Once you sign on with Craze, we immediately launch into onboarding. When you onboard, you’ll work with one of Craze’s marketing managers (like me!).

At this stage, we’re aiming to get you up and running as soon as possible. We start by sending you an onboarding sheet, complete with action items and questions. Some of the information we collect includes your:

• Marketing assets
• Marketing goals and priorities
• Existing marketing calendar
• Brand voice, tone, and guidelines
• Marketing assets (logo, fonts, icons, existing photos and videos, etc.)

This lets us do two things:

1. Understand, at a high level, what your marketing goals and timeline are.
2. Gather all of the assets we need in order to carry out your marketing goals effectively and efficiently.

Of course, not every client we work with will have all of the information we ask for, and that’s okay. Part of our job is to fill in the gaps as needed. But gathering this information ahead of time lets us get a complete picture of your existing marketing landscape without needing a ton of back-and-forth.

Kickoff

Once we have all of your information in one place, it’s time to come up with your marketing strategy.

While we take care of the strategizing and the day-to-day, it’s important to us that our plans align with your overall vision, so at this stage, we hop on a call. During the call, we learn — in detail — what your brand vision is, what kind of marketing approaches you enjoy (or hate!), what success looks like to you, and how you see things playing out. There’s no detail too small to share here.

At this stage, we’ll also share some initial suggestions as to how we can meet your goals and get your feedback on those suggestions.

We’ll also onboard you to Sprout Social, the platform that we use for social media scheduling and approvals, as well as any other collaboration tools we’ll use. Since we act as your internal marketing team, we also adapt to your existing processes. If you need us on Slack, we’ll plug into that. If you use a certain project management tool, we’ll get you to send us invites.

This helps ensure that we have a streamlined workflow going forward.

Planning

Based on the information we’ve gathered, we jump into planning mode. At this stage, your Craze marketing manager will work with the wider Craze team (of photographers, social media specialists, copywriters, and more) to come up with a strategy to meet (and exceed!) your goals, on your timeline.

How we do that really depends on each client. Some clients need us to start with branding or website development, others want us to go straight into event marketing, others will only need ongoing social media management or a photo shoot for a campaign (and we do all of these things). We don’t have a set process for our strategies because each company’s needs are really so unique.

Once we’ve landed on our proposed plan for your company, though, we put that together into a pitch deck and get you on a call to present our plan. If you love it, we get to work. If you don’t, we go back to the drawing board until we’ve gotten it right.

Executing

Once you’ve given us the green light, we spring into action. Depending on your needs, that might mean:

• 
  
• Creating a social media calendar
• Help to shape brand identity and messaging through our design / video services
• Target short-term and long-term business goals
• Develop and design digital spaces such as e-commerce, web, emails, etc.
• Crafting a content marketing strategy
• Plan and produce events
• Develop a paid media and SEO strategy
• Analyze competitors and conduct A/B testing  
• Scheduling photo and video shoots to create more content
• … or a mix of all of the above

As soon as we’ve ideated, we send any assets over to you for review and approval. If we’re creating social media content for you (as we do for over 80% of our clients), that process takes place right in Sprout Social, where you can accept or reject posts and leave notes for us on any proposed content.

We typically work about three months out, so if any changes need to be made, we have plenty of time to pivot or edit.

Keeping things organized & transparent

We’re really proud of the brand proposition at Craze, which is to deliver full-stack marketing at the cost of a single hire. This is really only possible because our entire company believes in being hyper-organized and over-communicating (both to you and each other!). We prioritze weekly or biweekly meetings, depending on your needs, to ensure we are meeting your expectations and filling in the gaps between daily conversations.  

Organization

As a marketing manager at Craze, I have a template for everything: from onboarding and creating a content calendar to outlining a pitch deck and crafting a shot list. We document everything, and our entire team knows exactly where to go to find brand assets and preferences. The technology that we use supports collaboration and communication both internally and externally, so that we work as efficiently as possible.

Communication

We work as your internal (yet external) marketing team, which means we're incredibly plugged in to your organization.

When we first get started with onboarding and strategizing, we hop on calls with you on a weekly (or twice weekly) basis, and we send updates often in whichever format you prefer — whether that’s through email, Slack, or a project management platform.

As time goes on, we’ll often need fewer calls, but we still keep a regular, biweekly call on the calendar and we’re just a Zoom away if we ever need to brainstorm or problem-solve.

Care to collaborate?

Our clients stay with us long-term, and we truly consider ourselves growth partners who are in it for the long haul.

If you have any questions about our process or you’re keen to know how we might tackle your own marketing needs, don’t hesitate to reach out for a consultation.