The first step is always to hear from our client: what are their business goals and objectives? Our job is to ask questions to clarify and help us define and refine how public relations, digital marketing and experiential marketing fits into the mix. For consumer marketing mandates with a larger scope, an integrated marketing approach always works best.

Based on our client’s business objectives, agreed upon public relations, digital marketing and experiential marketing goals – and budget – our team will set out to develop a strategy to realize those goals. We’ll ask ourselves: Who do we need to reach? What’s our story? What are our key messages? How can we tell our story most effectively?

Once our strategic roadmap is in place, we tap our integrated agency team’s creative power. We think big and we have fun with our divergent ideas. But, our facilitator is skilled at keeping the brainstorm on strategy so that we don’t veer off course. (Only sometimes, for our own amusement.)

With the brainstorm behind us, the core account team takes a critical look at the creative ideas within the context of strategy, budget, time and resources. This part of the process is about making the ideas workable. It involves refining, altering, or even creating new ideas. At the end of this creative refinement we are left with the tactics – the nuts and bolts of how our strategy comes to life and how our public relations, digital marketing and experiential marketing goals will be met.

At this stage, we set specific, measurable public relations, digital marketing and experiential marketing objectives. How will we define success specific to this program? What are our quantitative and qualitative measures? It’s different in every situation, and we work with our client to determine what the best benchmark for success will be.