Marketing strategy and execution
Most marketing fails on positioning, not on posting
A strategy that says who you are for and what you are instead of, then, if you want it, the material to execute it every month. Built by someone who runs this company's own marketing the same way, with a dated calendar, kill rules on paid, and an open benchmark.
Have an existing plan, a competitor teardown, or analytics exports? Attach them. Real numbers change the strategy more than any workshop.
- How it starts
- A written brief or a file you already have, then a call. Both free.
- Who does the work
- Nikola, plus a named collaborator where the work needs one: named before they start, never a bench.
- What you get
- Artifacts you own and can hand to any team, including one that is not us.
- Payment
- Split across agreed milestones. Nothing hourly by surprise.
How a project works
Why it is not working
Six failures, and none of them are fixed by posting more
Almost every stuck marketing effort is stuck on one of these. More output makes each of them worse rather than better, because volume multiplies whatever the message already is.
- Positioning that describes the category
- 'We help companies do X with AI' is what nine competitors say. Positioning is the sentence that makes someone say 'that is us', and it usually requires giving something up.
- An audience made up in a workshop
- Personas built from imagination rather than from the customers you already have. The ones you already have are the evidence, and almost nobody reads them properly.
- Every channel, badly
- Five channels at 20% effort loses to one at 100%. Choosing means saying no to four things that all sound reasonable, which is why it rarely happens.
- Content with nothing to point at
- Articles that end with 'contact us'. Nothing to run, nothing to download, nothing to find out, so the reader leaves and the traffic converts at a fraction of a percent.
- Nobody executes it
- The strategy document is good. Then the founder is selling, the developer is building, and month three has one post in it. This is the most common ending and it is why the retainer exists.
- Measuring the wrong thing
- Impressions, followers, traffic. None of them is the number. The number is qualified inquiries, and a strategy that does not name it cannot be judged.
Two ways to buy it
Decide it once. Execute it every month, if you want us to.
The strategy stands alone: it is a document you can hand to an agency, a freelancer or your own team. The retainer exists because most companies who buy a strategy do not execute it, and that is not a failure of will. It is capacity.
Start here
Marketing strategy: $7,000–12,000 one-time
20–35 hours
One engagement, one document, yours to run with, by us, by your team, or by an agency you hire instead.
- Positioning: what you are, for whom, instead of what
- The ideal customer, from your own data rather than a persona template
- Messaging: the three sentences everything else is built from
- Channel choice, and the honest case against the ones you were going to pick
- A dated content and campaign calendar, not a list of topics
- The measurement: which numbers mean it is working, and which are vanity
- A ninety-day plan someone can execute on Monday
Execution: light
$3,900/month
10 hours a month
The strategy kept alive: a steady drumbeat, and someone who notices when it stops working.
- 10 hours a month of production and oversight
- Content produced against the calendar, in your voice
- Monthly read of what moved and what to change
Recommended
Execution: standard
$7,000/month
20 hours a month
Enough capacity to run more than one channel properly.
- 20 hours a month across production, distribution and analysis
- Articles, landing pages, email and social material
- Paid campaigns set up, watched and killed when they should be
- A call every two weeks on what to do next
Execution: full
$13,000/month
40 hours a month
The marketing function itself, for a company that is not going to hire one this year.
- 40 hours a month across strategy, production and paid
- Landing pages built and shipped, not mocked up
- SEO and answer-engine work wired into the site itself
- Weekly reporting against the numbers agreed in the strategy
Hours are a cap and they are stated, here as everywhere else on this site. Bigger tiers carry a lower rate per hour ($390, $350, $325) because the work is more continuous and less of it is spent getting back up to speed. Terms are agreed on the call. Moving between tiers is an email.
What you end up holding
A plan with dates on it
The strategy is not a deck. It is the set of documents this company runs its own marketing from, written for yours.
- Positioning: what you are, for whom, and what you are instead of
- Ideal customer, drawn from your existing customers and your own data
- Messaging: the three sentences everything else is written from
- Channel choice, with the argument against the ones we are not doing
- A dated content calendar: items with titles and publish dates, not themes
- Campaign plan for paid, if paid makes sense, with budgets and kill rules
- The measurement: which numbers mean it is working, and what to ignore
- A ninety-day plan someone can start on Monday without asking a question
- Everything in a repository or a document you own
How it runs
Three to five weeks for the strategy, then monthly if you want it
01
Send the brief
What you sell, to whom, what you have tried, and anything you can attach: a plan, analytics, a competitor list. Free.
02
We read your data
Your customers, your analytics, your search terms, your competitors' actual rankings. Before any opinion is offered.
03
Positioning, argued
One position with the reasoning, and the things it requires you to give up. This is the part that changes results; the rest is execution.
04
The plan, with dates
Channels, calendar, campaigns, and the numbers that will say whether it worked.
05
Handover
A working session with whoever runs it. Your team, an agency, or us. The document is written so it does not need us.
06
Execution, optionally
If nobody there has the capacity, the retainer produces the material against the calendar we just agreed.
When this is the wrong thing to buy
- You want more traffic to a product nobody is buying. Marketing will find that out faster and more expensively than a week of customer conversations would.
- You want a strategy you are not going to execute and are not going to pay anyone else to execute. That is an expensive document.
- You want technical SEO fixed inside the product. That is /what-we-do/marketing, and it is engineering rather than strategy.
- You want a guaranteed number of leads by a date. Nobody can honestly promise that, and the ones who do are pricing in the refund.
- You want someone to post on social media daily and nothing more. A scheduler and a VA will do it far more cheaply.
Why take this from us
Because the method we would use for you runs this company's own marketing
This company's own marketing runs on the same method: a dated content calendar, a paid plan with budgets and kill rules decided in advance, and a public benchmark built to be cited. You can see the output on this site and in the blog. That is the system we would build for you.
- 1
- dated calendar, not a list of topics
- 90
- days in the plan you can start on Monday
- 200+
- apps audited to produce something worth citing
- 0
- external marketing case studies: we do not have any yet
Questions
Marketing, in detail
- Do I have to take the retainer?
- No, and plenty do not. The strategy is deliberately written so an agency, a freelancer or your own marketer can execute it. If you have someone capable, hiring us to do it too would be waste.
- Can I start with the retainer and skip the strategy?
- We would rather not. Producing material against an undecided position is how a content mill happens: a lot of output, no compounding. If a strategy already exists and it is good, we will read it and start from there. That is a different and cheaper conversation.
- Have you done this for clients before?
- Not as a paid engagement yet, and the page says so. What you can judge is the output: this site, the blog and the benchmark.
- Do you write the content yourself?
- Yes, in your voice, and with a human deciding what is worth publishing. There is automation in the drafting, but nothing goes out unread. Content nobody edited reads like content nobody edited.
- Does this include paid ads?
- The strategy says whether paid is right for you and what it would cost, which is sometimes 'not yet'. The standard and full retainers run the campaigns, with budgets and kill rules agreed in advance so nothing quietly burns money.
- What about AI search: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews?
- It is part of the strategy rather than an add-on, and it is mostly not about keywords. It is about having something only you can say, published in a form a machine can lift and attribute. That is exactly why this site publishes a benchmark.
- How soon does it work?
- Paid can produce inquiries in a week and tells you fast whether the message lands. Organic takes three to six months before it compounds, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The strategy says which of the two your situation calls for first.
Related
SEO engineering
The technical half: rendering, structured data, analytics in the build.
Brand design
The identity the marketing is built on.
Business consulting
When the question is the business model, not the channel.
Product & system design
If the product itself is the thing that needs deciding.
The benchmark
An example of the kind of asset that earns citations.
Product partner
Product, design and engineering as one ongoing arrangement.
The blog
What the content machine described here actually produces.
From the products we build
Free tools and guides from software we built and run ourselves.
- merlinwild.comHow to build a content campaign planOne audience, one useful offer and a measurable next step, with a practical brief and a weekly review.Read it
- merlinwild.comHow to measure a content marketing funnelReach, visits, registrations and purchases, and the places where attribution quietly breaks.Read it
- merlinwild.comA practical campaign brief templateAudience, offer, message, proof, channels and measurement on one page you can reuse.Read it
Send it over
Tell us what you sell and to whom
What the product is, who buys it today, what you have already tried, and what happened. If you have analytics exports, an existing plan or a competitor list, attach them: real numbers beat any workshop.
One person reads every brief. You will get a straight answer on whether marketing is your constraint, including when it is not.
