How is this different from a typical marketing-agency strategy?

Most agency strategy decks read the same: SWOT, persona slides, channel mix, calendar. Ours is a written document that names the metric we'll move, the budget that buys it, the channels we'll defund if they don't perform, and the dates we'll review them. It's the operating manual for the next 12–18 months, not a pitch artifact.

How long does a strategy engagement take?

Four to six weeks for the core document. Two weeks of discovery (interviews, data pull, competitor and audience research), two weeks of synthesis and drafting, one to two weeks of review and revision with your team.

Do you need our internal data to build a strategy?

Yes. Access to GA4, ad accounts, CRM, sales pipeline, and customer support data is the difference between a real strategy and a guessed one. We sign NDAs and use read-only access where possible.

What does the strategy actually contain?

A market and competitor map, customer-segment definitions with willingness-to-pay anchors, brand positioning, channel mix with budget allocation, a 12-week execution plan, and the metrics dashboard we'll review monthly. Roughly 40–60 pages of text and exhibits — no fluff.

Can we execute the strategy without you?

Yes. We write it that way on purpose. About a third of our strategy clients take the document and run it with their internal team. Another third hires us to implement part of it. The last third becomes a retainer client.

Marketing strategy that survives contact with the market

Why most marketing strategies end up in a drawer

We've audited a lot of agency-produced strategy decks. The pattern repeats. The deck is sixty slides. It opens with the brand's mission, contains a SWOT, sketches three personas with stock-photo headshots, lists ten channels we should "consider," and ends with a Gantt chart that loses contact with reality by week six.

Nobody opens the deck again. The team falls back to whatever they were doing before, except now there's an invoice attached to the failed strategy and a quiet erosion of trust in the next agency.

We do this differently because we've watched it fail too many times.

What a real strategy looks like

A marketing strategy worth paying for is a written, dated, signed document that answers six questions plainly:

What's the single business outcome this strategy will move? Not "growth." Not "brand awareness." Something measurable, e.g. "Increase qualified pipeline from €240K/month to €600K/month by end of Q3."
Who specifically are we selling to, and what do they pay? With named accounts where the deal sizes warrant it, willingness-to-pay anchors, and a buying-process map.
Why us, in one paragraph? Not a tagline. The actual reason our offer wins against the two alternatives the customer is also considering.
Which channels, with what budget, in what order? With a kill criterion for each channel, evaluated monthly.
What does the next 90 days look like, day by week? Specific deliverables, specific owners, specific dates.
How will we know it's working, and how will we know to stop? The dashboard, the threshold, the decision rights.

If your current strategy doesn't answer all six, it isn't a strategy. It's a plan to look busy.

Our process — 4 to 6 weeks, no longer

Week 1: Discovery

Founder/CEO interview (90 min)
Head of sales / customer success interview (60 min each)
3–5 customer interviews (45 min each, we run them)
Data pull: GA4, ad accounts, CRM, support tickets, billing
Competitor and adjacent-market scan

Week 2: Audience and economics

Customer-segment definitions with revenue, retention, and acquisition-cost data
Willingness-to-pay anchoring through pricing experiments or comparable benchmarks
Sales-cycle map per segment

Week 3: Channel and positioning

Channel-mix recommendations with budget allocation and expected ROAS / CAC / payback
Positioning paragraph and the two-sentence pitch
Brand voice and messaging guide

Week 4: Operating plan

90-day execution plan with weekly deliverables and owners
Quarterly milestones for the next 12 months
Dashboard definition (live Looker Studio or equivalent)
Kill criteria for each channel and each campaign

Weeks 5–6: Review and revision

Document review with your leadership team
Revisions
Final hand-off including a one-page exec summary, the full strategy doc, the dashboard, and a 90-minute kickoff for the team executing it

What's in the deliverable

| Section | Pages | Purpose | |---|---|---| | Executive summary | 1 | What we recommend, in one page, signable by the CEO | | Market and competitor map | 4–8 | Where the money is and who already has it | | Customer segments | 6–10 | Who we sell to, in priority order, with economics | | Positioning and messaging | 3–5 | Why us, in our voice | | Channel strategy | 8–12 | Budget allocation, expected ROAS, kill criteria | | 90-day execution plan | 6–10 | Day-by-week deliverables and owners | | Dashboard and review cadence | 2–3 | How we'll know it's working | | Appendices | varies | Interview notes, data exhibits, benchmark sources |

Who buys this from us

Founders preparing for a fundraise who need a defensible go-to-market story.
CMOs at €5M–€80M companies who inherited a marketing function and need to write the operating manual.
Companies entering a new market — typically a European company expanding to North America or vice versa.
Companies whose marketing has been flat for 18+ months and need an outside read on whether to double down or change direction.

What we don't do

Brand-only strategy. If you want a logo, a colour palette, and a "brand book" without a revenue plan, you don't need us.
Strategy for a product that doesn't exist yet. We can shape positioning for an MVP, but we won't write a 12-month plan for a roadmap that's still vapor.
Pitch consulting. We're not a presentation-coaching firm.

Pricing

A clearly scoped audit starts at €1,800. Ongoing retainers start at €2,400 per month. Larger projects are quoted after scope is agreed.

For the audit that often precedes a strategy engagement, see /marketing-analysis-of-the-market. For the channels that the strategy typically activates, see /seo-promotion, /smm-promotion, /targeting-ads, and /promotion-in-ai-search-and-llm-systems.

Written by Maksym Stepanenko, founder of Marketing MIX. Last reviewed: 2026-05-13.

A real marketing strategy. Not a slide deck