Dóchas Psychological Services
You might be wondering what a marketing plan from Fesyk Marketing looks like. More importantly, you’re probably wondering what a Fesyk Marketing plan put into action looks like. After all, what good is a plan that looks great on paper, but never sees the light of day? It’s the action piece that’s super crucial!
One of our amazing clients, Dóchas Psychological Services, is nearing its one-year anniversary with us, so let’s take a look back at one of our marketing plans in action.
We’ve broken down our process into four steps: Align, Advise, Activate, and Amplify. We have handy little descriptions of each of these on our homepage. But let’s look at each of these steps in the real life of a client.
Align
Aligning goals and getting to know the client
Kim at Dóchas Psychological Services had dreams for her brand—she wanted to help more people by expanding her team and moving into a bigger office. We knew we could help her get there, but we first had to spend some time with her to really understand her vision. This gave us a clear picture of her strengths and where she wanted her business to go.
She wanted her marketing to be a reflection of her team and their deeply caring nature, to be of service to her current clients, and to help anyone seeking mental health advice. She hadn’t done much digital marketing beyond an underutilized Facebook business page, and she knew more was necessary to achieve her goals. In order to grow her team, she knew she had to increase awareness of her brand to attract new clients.
Learning about Kim’s personal brand and vision allowed us to align her goals and begin to formulate a measurable marketing strategy.
Advise
Organizing goals and advising on a plan of action
Once we understood Kim’s vision, we began to create the roadmap to achieve her goals with a strategic marketing and content plan.
Like most of our clients, some of the steps to achieving Kim’s goals were very clear, but in other areas, we had to select where to focus. In Kim’s case, we knew she and her team had excellent mental health knowledge to share, and a blog was an obvious “key project” in her marketing plan to demonstrate their expertise. It would also achieve her goal of helping those in her community. By using the skills and content she and her team already had, we could leverage her strengths to build her brand in a way that didn’t use up all of her resources.
We began by outlining the client’s goals, the brand identity, the target audience, the current marketing tactics, how well they’re working, and our recommendations. Our plan for Kim laid out a road map for building her brand online and into her community.
We identified her target audience so that we could create a brand and promotion strategy that would connect and engage the people she wanted to reach. Listening to her talk about her audience was so important in visualizing who she needed to be talking to.
We also conducted an audit of the marketing Kim was doing (which had been very limited) and then made recommendations on which initiatives were in line with her goals and were worth continuing. We then looked at other opportunities to support the growth and expansion of the Dóchas team. This included opportunities for collaboration with others in her community, brand building, and also options for social media platform optimization (such as how frequently to post) and newsletter content.
Blogs take time to produce, so we crafted a content plan, which included website and social content. We broke it down into actionable steps, and we created a calendar, brainstormed themes for each month, and created a system for the Dóchas team to share content with us.
Typically during this step, we guide our clients through the marketing mix and prioritize everything they need to do to achieve their goals. It’s not worthwhile for you to be on every social media platform that exists, or to spread yourself too thin over too many projects. We help our clients strategize which projects will get them to where they want to go while integrating all the necessary pieces (website, social media, networking, and other community outreach) to work together in beautiful harmony.
Activate
Executing the Marketing Plan
We pride ourselves on creating actionable marketing plans. Everything is based on the goals and budget of the client and the resources we have available to us. So once Kim approved the Dóchas marketing plan, the road map was laid out in front of us and we got to work.
The branding process was so much fun, and with the help of our amazing partners at Fox and Forth we were able to come up with something really special for Kim.
We updated the Dóchas website, established a community on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, developed themes for the newsletter, and worked on building a list for targeted outreach to those who would be great partners for Kim. It’s really important to ensure all the moving pieces work together to achieve the goals we had set.
For the blog, Kim’s team was responsible for providing our team with an outline for each blog and then our team took over the writing from there. The Dóchas team sent us content in whatever format was easiest for them—whether in written paragraphs, in point form, or recorded audio. Then we edited, optimized for SEO, and created graphics to connect the content visually with the target audience.
With all the elements in place, the Dóchas blog officially launched on October 26, 2020.
Amplify
Relationship Marketing at work
With the new branding in place, a weekly blog being published, and an outreach plan to initiate, we began to broadcast Dóchas Psychological Services to the world.
With our strategic goals in mind, we created content to strengthen relationships with the current Dóchas community on Facebook and increase awareness about the Dóchas brand on Instagram. As well, we established a monthly newsletter to bring levity to the great Dóchas community. We also began to create new partnerships and referral sources via email outreach.
By having an active and engaging presence online, Dóchas was able to connect with more and more people.
Want to get a closer look at what this looks like? You can check out some of Dóchas’ content here!
Results
How do we know we are doing a good job?
Here comes the part you’re probably most interested in. After all this work, what did we achieve?
Well, twelve months later, the Dóchas brand is well established. The team has grown from four to thirteen, and they’ve moved into the bigger office that Kim dreamed about at that first meeting. With the help of a marketing plan, the message is spreading and the business is thriving. Growing a blog audience from scratch is no easy task, but the Dóchas blog has grown from not existing at all to reaching over a thousand readers a month. This is supported by Dóchas social media channels, where the Dóchas Instagram has grown from zero to over 250 engaged followers in a year. Kim is also getting recognized within her city as a great community partner.
The growing Dóchas team
Why Our Process Works
#1 We are collaborative.
Kim and her team do the real work. Day in and day out they are helping their clients and sharing their knowledge. Our role at Fesyk Marketing is to build on the already-existing strengths of a brand, showcasing these skills and expertise to the world and making these more visible to the target audiences with a strategic marketing strategy.
#2 Relationship marketing works.
By creating content that resonates with the target audience and amplifying the message to the right community, we supported Dóchas in strengthening their current community to increase referrals and then build awareness so that the community could grow.
And don’t just take our word for it, here’s what Kim has to say about the past twelve months:
Before Fesyk, I was cobbling together a makeshift marketing plan from things I was trying to read from the net about what I was supposed to be doing. Let’s face it, I didn’t have a clue. Then you come along, ask clear guiding questions, and next thing I know, I have a functioning blog, a YouTube channel, and an Instagram page. You also were able to get my team on board and did so without create a lot of extra work on our end…
You’ve managed my expectations, my moods, my fears and insecurities all with laughter and positivity. You take the Dóchas brand (which we didn’t have before and now do because of you) and create amazing things for us. The entire team at Fesyk treats my business like it’s theirs, open to all of our ideas and tweaking them into something healing for our clients. You literally make what I fear is impossible, possible.