A marketing strategy engagement for businesses who are ready to stop guessing and start building something that compounds. Delivered as a one-off strategy project or an ongoing fractional CMO retainer.
There’s a difference between doing marketing and having a marketing strategy. Doing marketing means running ads, posting on social, sending emails, maybe dabbling in SEO. Having a strategy means knowing exactly who you’re targeting, what you’re saying, which channels earn their place, and how it all connects to a commercial outcome.
Without the strategy layer, every activity runs independently. Budgets get allocated based on habit or gut feel. Results are hard to attribute. And when something isn’t working, there’s no framework to diagnose why.
You’re spending on marketing but can’t clearly explain what’s working and what isn’t
Different channels feel disconnected – each doing its own thing with no shared direction
You’ve tried several agencies or tactics and none of them quite delivered what you expected
You’re about to scale and want to make sure you’re scaling the right things
You know your market has changed but your marketing hasn’t kept up
You’re growing fast but nobody owns the marketing direction
Strategy as a one-off project if you need clarity and a plan. Strategy as an ongoing retainer if you need someone in the room every month making sure it gets executed.
A defined project with a clear output – a marketing strategy document and presentation that gives you everything you need to execute with confidence, whether you’re doing it yourself, briefing an agency, or hiring a team.
Typically delivered over four to six weeks, with two or three working sessions and a final presentation. Everything is documented and transferable.
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Discovery and audit of current marketing activity
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Market and competitor analysis
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Target audience definition and messaging framework
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Channel strategy and budget allocation recommendations
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12-month marketing roadmap with priorities and milestones
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Final strategy document and presentation session
Ongoing strategic marketing leadership without the cost of a full-time CMO. A monthly retainer that puts a senior marketing strategist in your corner every month – reviewing performance, making decisions, and keeping the strategy connected to what’s actually happening in the business.
Built for businesses who need more than a plan – they need someone to own the direction.
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Monthly strategy session and performance review
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Channel oversight across all active marketing activity
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Agency and supplier briefing and management
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Budget planning and reallocation recommendations
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Quarterly strategy reviews and roadmap updates
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Direct access for questions, decisions, and reviews
Every strategy engagement produces outputs that are genuinely actionable – not a 60-page PDF that sits in a folder and gets referenced once.
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An honest assessment of where things are now – what’s working, what isn’t, what’s missing, and what’s being done out of habit rather than evidence. The starting point for any strategy worth having.
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Where you sit in the market, who your real competitors are, what they’re doing well, and where the gaps are. Built from actual research, not assumptions about what the market looks like.
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Precise audience profiles built around actual buying behaviour and motivation, with a messaging framework that tells you what to say, how to say it, and which angle works for which audience segment.
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Which channels earn their place in your mix and why. Recommended budget allocation across channels, with the rationale explained in terms of your unit economics rather than general best practice.
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A prioritised plan for the next 12 months – what gets done first, what gets done later, and what gets deprioritised. Clear enough to brief a team or an agency. Practical enough to actually execute.
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The metrics that matter for your specific business, how to track them, and what good looks like at each stage of the plan. So you know whether the strategy is working before you’re six months in and wondering.
The engagement looks different depending on where you’re starting from. But the underlying problem is almost always the same: marketing activity happening without a coherent strategy connecting it.
You’ve been growing on referrals, word of mouth, or founder-led sales. It’s worked so far. But it’s not scalable, and you know it. You need a plan that translates what’s worked organically into something repeatable and channel-driven.
The signal: “We’ve never really had a proper marketing strategy.”
You had a strategy. It made sense when you wrote it. But the market has shifted, the team has changed, the business has evolved, and somewhere along the way the strategy stopped reflecting reality. Time for a reset.
The signal: “We’ve been doing the same things for a few years and growth has plateaued.”
Things are working. Revenue is growing. But you’re adding channels, hiring people, and spending more budget – and the strategy hasn’t kept pace with the growth. You need to make sure you’re scaling the right things before the wrong ones get baked in.
The signal: “We’re growing but I’m not sure our marketing is as efficient as it should be.”
The project engagement typically runs four to six weeks. The retainer starts after an initial strategy session and runs month to month from there.
A structured discovery session covering your business model, revenue breakdown, current marketing activity, budget, team, customers, and commercial targets. Followed by an independent audit of your current marketing – channels, creative, analytics, and positioning – before the first working session.
Discovery session Marketing audit Analytics review Competitor research
Audience profiles, positioning, messaging hierarchy, channel recommendations, and budget allocation developed into a working draft. A second session to present, challenge, and refine – because strategy built in isolation rarely survives contact with the people who know the business best.
Audience profiles Positioning statement Messaging framework Channel recommendations
The 12-month roadmap, KPI framework, and measurement plan built and packaged into a final strategy document. Presented in a final session with enough time to walk through every section, answer every question, and make sure the team knows how to use it.
12-month roadmap KPI framework Budget model Final presentation
For clients who continue on a retainer: monthly performance reviews, strategy sessions, channel oversight, and a standing availability for decisions, briefs, and reviews that need senior input. The strategy stays live rather than becoming a document that gets referenced less and less over time.
Monthly sessions Performance reviews Channel oversight Quarterly updates
The project engagement typically runs four to six weeks from the initial discovery session to the final presentation. The timeline depends on how quickly feedback sessions can be scheduled and how much existing data and documentation is available at the start. A clear brief and available stakeholders makes it faster.
The project produces a strategy. The retainer makes sure it gets executed and stays relevant. Most businesses find the strategy useful immediately after delivery – but without someone keeping it connected to the business month by month, it drifts. The retainer is for businesses who want that ongoing connection without hiring a full-time marketing director.
Almost certainly yes. Agencies execute. Strategy – the decisions about what to execute, on which channels, for which audience, with which message – is something most agencies don’t do, and most clients don’t realise isn’t being done. A strategy engagement gives you the brief the agency needs to do their job properly, and a framework to hold them accountable against.
Access to your analytics, your current marketing spend breakdown, a clear brief on your commercial targets, and availability for two to three working sessions. The more existing documentation you have – brand guidelines, customer data, previous strategy work – the better. But starting from scratch is also fine; the discovery process is designed to surface what’s needed.
Yes. The full range of execution services – paid media, SEO, branding, and more – are available alongside or after the strategy engagement. Most clients find it’s most effective to do the strategy first and then bring in execution on the channels the strategy identifies as priorities.
A strategy engagement is a structured process with defined outputs, not a workshop that produces a slide deck of recommendations. The discovery, audit, build, and presentation phases are separate for a reason – good strategy requires time to research, challenge assumptions, and pressure-test recommendations. A day rate gets you opinions. This gets you a strategy.
A 30-minute call to understand your business, your current marketing, and your targets – and work out whether a strategy engagement is the right next step.
Strategic marketing consultancy. Liverpool, working with ambitious brands across the UK.
Copyright © 2026 Rob Russell. All rights reserved.
Strategic Marketing Consultant · Liverpool
