HandBuiltBrands Master Plan, part II
We exist to provide our clients the lowest cost of growth — the most efficient marketing possible.
We are the source of an authentic brand presence.
We believe that expertise communicated wisely to the right people at the right times in the right places is what drives business forward.
We help businesses create content that tells their story, communicates their experience and expertise.
We help businesses build authority.
We do things the right way, The HandBuilt Way, and find ways to communicate that they are an authentic, trustworthy business.
We believe that these are the principles of top 1% search engine optimization and generative engine optimization (being an authoritative, expert online resource and thus showing up in AI). That is the long game for every business.
To play, you also need to play the short game and that's digital advertising (Google search ads first and foremost).
And you need to know that you are growing the business, so there is a unified CRM that we require clients to have that incorporates revenue, gross profit/contribution margin, and attributes lead sources to the won business. We need to know what's growing the business and where to focus investment.
That's what we do right now and we have a world-beating process for it.
We are a team of smart Brand Managers. This is a pretty common question: why are we HandBuiltBrands? Why Brands? Why would a performance digital marketing agency committed to a lower cost of growth and the most efficient digital marketing possible label themselves as Brand-forward?
Because that's what you are as a business. You are using the principles of branding to set yourself apart in the marketplace. Your brand is absolutely core to your go-to-market strategy. And if you don't know who you are, no one else is gonna know who you are.
So that's what we do. Even if you have a well-established brand, documentation, and all the things — in our process, we are going to start from the bottom and build our way upwards.
And even though I consider our process best-in-class, we are transforming our process and rebuilding it with AI Assistants that will enable us to help 10–100x the number of businesses that we are able to today.
Allow me to describe those from the bottom up.
Bedrock — The Bedrock is the signal from the noise. Every day and in every business, there are conversations with customers, with teammates, and with people like us. When you are trying to communicate what your business is all about, there's a lot of noise and sometimes it's hard to find the signal in the noise, but that's what AI Assistant Audrey is being trained to do. We have two ears and one mouth — "Audrey" is trained not to hear, but to listen. We have spent our careers learning how to listen for that signal, and for each business we work with, we are teaching Audrey to learn what is signal and what is noise in these conversations.
Foundation — When you organize the signal correctly, you get the foundation of the business's digital presence. That includes a brand voice — what you sound like. It includes audience segment profiles of who you serve. It includes a product/service catalog — what you do, how you help customers, and what makes you different from others — and ergo, a competitive profile — your differentiation. The Foundation document is the persistent memory of the business. It's what the plans are built upon, and it only changes if we and our Assistants find new signals from the noise that are different from what we've documented as the Foundation.
Alfred is the AI Assistant that oversees the Bedrock, the Foundation, the Blueprint, and the Workshop — all of it. I like the Christopher Nolan quote — when he was explaining the actual role to Michael Caine before Batman Begins — that Alfred is not the butler. He is Bruce Wayne's stepfather. Alfred assists our Brand Managers in overseeing the Bedrock of the business, the Foundation, and how we plan things — the Blueprint.
Blueprint is just what it sounds like. It's where the plans are created. It includes a go-to-market strategy (GTM Plan), a content plan, the advertising strategy and structure and the necessary documents needed to create those, including competitive reports and whatnot. There are several AI Assistants who live in the planning area. Marty, a GTM expert. Scott, the scout for competitive intelligence. Arch, the architect who creates and updates the content plans. These Assistants work for Alfred, and he and the Foundation document are the connective tissue between all of them. Right next to the Blueprint is the:
Workshop — and that is where we do content work and ads work. Our content work has always been a terrific process, even going back almost 10 years. That's why we created a workbook on Amazon called the Content Champion Guide. Our process has always been about researching, then outlining — weaving in subject matter expertise either from an interview or signal from a previously recorded interview that we have in the Bedrock and the Foundation. Connie and the Brand Manager create and iterate on these based on the content plan which supports the go-to-market plan.
As a part of the go-to-market plan, there is always an ads plan. We have a unique Google search ads process and perspective. And it is informed through all of this work in its entirety. Our AI Assistant Addison helps execute and manage these campaigns, and we continually train her on what we would look for and how we would run the ads work.
The other aspects of the go-to-market plan are typically: Email newsletters, Outbound email prospecting, Authentic social content and engagement, Outreach for third-party Brand mentions (PR). The GTM plan outlines who is doing what for these activities internally at the client or other 3rd parties or the roadmap to incorporate them. And the HandBuiltBrands System is built to support all of these services.
Our Brand Managers are central to this process. We very intentionally refer to AI Assistants as Assistants; they are not agents. They do not replace work, and they do not do it autonomously. There is a team of humans in the loop, and when we couple all of this work with the website build, the business build, continual analytics, and continual conversations with clients — all of it is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that gives us more signal, makes the Foundation stronger and stronger, and helps us grow clients' businesses.
There's no two ways about it — America has to grow its way out of the debt crisis that it is in. The middle-market B2B businesses are the engine of America. AI has to assist us in that process — it is too helpful and has too much potential to not train these systems individually for each client's business that we help.
The system of performance marketing + AI Assistants is Step 1, and getting it to work for the benefit of faster, more efficient client growth is paramount. Further down the roadmap could be making the system more automated and turning it around and making it publicly accessible software.
How Do We Start
1. An Intro Conversation
Everything starts with an intro conversation, a mutual “smell test” if you will. Do we like each other? Do we seem like we'd enjoy working together?
What's your business like and can we help you?
If we both feel like we can, we begin an assessment.
2. Assessment
Our assessment process is a short but incredibly impactful paid engagement.
When we perform an assessment, we are not only getting to know each other and conducting due diligence on your business, but we are creating the Bedrock, the Foundation, and the Blueprint. We are learning about your sales process and have access to your CRM and are determining what makes your economic engine run. After the assessment, we can start or clients can take the deliverables and execute the program on their own.
Coming out of an assessment, you will have the:
Foundation documentation,
a go-to-market plan,
a content plan, and an
ads strategy — structure and recommendation.
We will have an analytics and tracking implementation plan if it's not already set up. The intention is to stand up our system during the assessment process so that if we choose to engage together, all we have to say is …
go.
