FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Billing & Contract Terms

Bank Transfers:

This is an easy and secure way to pay. You will submit your bank information electronically (using TRUSTe) when you receive your invoice via email.

Check:

For monthly services, invoices will be sent electronically 30 days prior to the recurring campaign date in order to receive payment upon the recurring service date.

Note: if paying by check, work begins once payment has been received.

Credit Card:

We accept Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express for invoices that are less than $1,000.

We use Quickbooks for invoicing and accounting. Invoices are setup with the payment schedule and terms as described in your signed master services agreement (MSA).

Initial invoice(s) will be sent out within the first few days of signing, with the option of paying via ACH directly from the invoice.

There are three types of potential SOW’s that may be established between Launcharm and its clients.

Project SOWs:

Project SOWs are services that start and complete over four (4) or more weeks. In order to commence the SOW, a payment of 50% of the total investment is due on or before the date of the kick-off workshop (“kick-off”). The second and final invoice for the remaining balance of the total investment will be sent when the scope of work is complete. This invoice is “due upon receipt.” Project SOW’s are priced as a flat-rate. Project pricing can vary greatly ($10k-100k) due to the amount of work that a client may or may not need to establish their foundation, or what we call an “ecosystem.”

On-Demand SOWs:

On-Demand SOWs are services that start and complete in less than four (4) weeks. Payment is due upon completion of an On-Demand SOW. On-Demand SOWs are priced hourly. Hourly rates range from $125-200 per hour, depending on the service requested.

Recurring Service SOWs:

Recurring Service SOWs are services that repeat on a monthly basis. Payments are due on or before the 1st of each service month. Recurring Service SOW’s are priced as a flat-rate on a monthly recurring basis. Recurring service pricing can vary greatly ($10k-50k per month) due to the number of areas of our client’s “ecosystem” that we manage and execute. Our pricing does not include advertising spend as those fees are paid directly to advertising channels.

Pay-for-Performance

We do not offer pay-for-performance terms with our agreements due to the long-term approach of a quality program. For this reason, only a small percentage of your investment can be measured for ROI within the same period that the investment was made – the majority of your investment will result in assets that drive audience growth long after our work is done.

Contact your strategist via email to request a cancellation of services.

Recurring Service SOW’s must be terminated with at least 90 days written notice (a “rolling 90” agreement).

kickstarter & Indiegogo Marketing

We don’t create any of the creative. With that said, we give a lot of direction as to what creative will work best for your product. We also guide you through creating a high converting campaign page and video.

No creator spends the same amount on ads. Launcharm only advises you to continue spending on advertising when the metrics show a likely positive return on investment. We take a gradual, stair-step approach to minimize risk, as opposed to throwing thousands of dollars into ad spend and hoping it works.

By using YOUR data from the testing phase, we are able to give you a more personalized and accurate budget.

The average pre-launch is 2 to 3 months.

Once you launch on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, your live campaign will run for 30 days.

After the campaign is over, creators typically take 6 to 12 months to deliver the final product to their customers which, in our experience, is plenty of time.

Content & Inbound Marketing

We need a main point of contact from your side, usually the marketing manager, and access to your subject matter experts (SMEs).

The first month is all-hands on deck, and then after that, we’ll get into a cadence where just the marketing manager is required for of the strategy and approvals.

You’ll hit the ground running with strategy meetings the first two weeks: buyer personas, messaging strategy, keyword research.

The second two weeks you’ll be approving blog briefs and drafts.

Your first blogs will be published starting month 2 of the program and will continue to be published weekly from there.

Yes. HubSpot is required for topic clusters and reporting. Your blogs can be implemented on WordPress if you’d like instead…but we would suggest they be published on HubSpot to take full advantage of the HubSpot reports.

Yes. This is performed in-house, at no additional cost outside of the agreed upon content development scope between the Launcharm and our clients.

Yes. As a HubSpot Platinum tier certified partner agency, we’re experts in developing and deploying content marketing campaigns for our clients.

Specific content deliverables include, but are not limited to: owned blog content, earned blog content placement, infographics, white-papers, photo edits, video edits, landing pages, webpages, executive interviews, etc.

Yes. CRO is a primary service offering provided in-house for which we have a dedicated team. We leverage tools like Crazy Egg and Google Optimize to deliver website personalization and multivariate testing for our clients.

Yes. We offer digital content placement, blog posts, interactive content, infographic creation and marketing, directory submissions, citation creation, and competitor backlink analysis.

We do not offer video production in-house. But, we often recommend and work closely with local video production contractors and agencies.

Digital Advertising

We offer paid advertising campaign management across a variety of social media and search engine platforms including:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Google
• TikTok

 

First, we select a list of research-backed, optimized keywords that will be triggered by users searching in search engines like Google.

For those keywords, we develop and write advertising creative to market your products or services so that users will your advertisement when they search for relevant terms.

You will pay each time a user clicks on the advertisement and traffic is delivered to your website. This payment model is referred to as Cost per Click (CPC).

The CPC amount you will pay is dependent upon a preset “maximum bid” determined by what you’re willing to spend. Additionally, there are other factors that influence the CPC such as the quality of your advertising account structure, advertising creative, and advertising relevance.

Paid social media advertising works similarly to paid search advertising in the fact that cost is often accrued on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis — that is, you pay only for the traffic that is delivered to your website from the advertisement. That said, there are two noteworthy differences between paid social media advertising and paid search advertising:

1. Paid social media advertising targets buyers during different stages of their buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision), where paid search advertising mostly targets people in the consideration and decision stages.
2. Paid social media advertising is “passive” in that the advertisement is delivered to people that match certain audience criteria as opposed to paid search advertising where the advertisement is delivered to people based on their “active” keyword search on websites like Google, YouTube, etc.

Our approach to developing paid campaigns depends on variables like campaign goals, buyer personas, our clients’ sales cycles, and commercial transaction type (B2B or B2C).

EX) Optimizing lead-gen campaigns with Google Ads for B2C companies with considered sales cycles, requires razor sharp buyer personas and demographic targeting, tightly themed ad groups, testing ad copy and enticing offers, focused landing pages and a variety of keywords.

Upon returning your SOW, your strategist will schedule a kick-off phone call or in-person meeting with your team.

We will take over management of your campaigns at this time and follow up on the action items we outlined in our initial audit of your account and your SOW.

Generally, within 1-3 weeks of our initial kick-off call, you will have a newly-revised series of campaigns ready to launch!

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok.

The primary benefit to having an agency manage your social media campaign is experience.

By focusing specifically on social media, agencies have the ability to stay up-to-date on current trends, tools, advertising strategy, platform changes, and know all of the ins and outs of the various intricacies of social media.

Yes. Social media works for every company.

Social media allows one-to-one brand-buyer relationships to be developed and maintained like no other advertising channel.

Furthermore, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are equipped with some of the largest audiences and most advanced analytics data in the world.

You can identify your target audience on a hyper-granular level to provide timely, personalized, custom experiences with your brand that will drive long-term brand awareness and engagement.

OuGeneral

Monday – Friday, 9 AM – 5 PM PST.

Yes, providing thought leadership, and being active in the global marketing community is very important to our team. Our team members have spoken at universities, entrepreneur organization events, local high school’s, marketing events, and conferences around the world on a variety of topics.

We work to stay on the cutting edge of digital marketing best practices, always develop new talks and slide decks, and openly share our ‘secret sauce’ from our client success in order to ensure attendees garner valuable, unique content.

Get in touch with us to discuss your conference or event. Frank Cowell, our CEO, is also available to deliver keynote presentations. If you are interested, please email: info@launcharm.com

No, but thank you!

We’re always looking to develop relationships and meet new prospective employees.

If we’re not actively hiring at a given time, we’re still working to build up our talent bench.

View our Careers page »

Our Process & Client Expectations

Operationally mature organizations in the following verticals:

• Professional
• ServicesCPA
• Legal
• Finance
• Insurance
• Real Estate
• Consulting
• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Nonprofit

Our high level process of executing a digital marketing campaign includes the following 6 steps: Assess, Plan, Build, Drive, Optimize, and Grow.

Assess:

In the Assess Stage, we will assess your current digital marketing performance to establish a benchmark and get an understanding of KPI’s such as:

• Monthly Website Visits
• Visit-to-Lead Conversion/Sale Percentage
• Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Percentage
• Opportunity-to-Customer Conversion Percentage
• Average Initial Order Value (IOV)
• Average Lifetime Value (LTV)
• Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA)
• Number of Customers You’re Currently Generating from Digital Efforts
• Number of Customers You Need to Generate to Achieve Growth Objectives

Additionally, you’ll want to answer the following questions:

• What is our company and marketing department trying to accomplish in the next 12-24 months?
• What important milestones do we have to hit to meet our goals?
• What are we currently struggling with?
• What specific problems do we solve better than anyone else?
• Which target audiences care most about those problems?
• In looking at our metrics, where is our growth bottleneck?
• Is our digital platform (website, social, automation, etc.) ready to support our digital marketing efforts and, if not, what’s lacking?

Plan

Now that there is a baseline understanding of your current digital marketing performance, we’ll move into the Plan Stage where we will collaborate on, research, and define the following:

• Discovery — a deeper dive into your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, competitors, etc.
• Targeting Strategy — the top buyer personas you’re after and where to reach them online.
• Overarching Content Strategy — the overarching content funnel needed to engage your targeted buyer personas so they naturally move from one relationship level to the next.
• Traffic Strategy — where and how we’ll distribute content (through organic and paid methods) to make sure that your content is optimally placed in front of your targeted buyer personas.
• Lead Generation Strategy — specific premium content and resources needed to convert buyer personas into leads in your database.
• Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation Strategy — the specific content and automation needed to nurture leads into opportunities/sales.
• Measurement & Reporting Protocol — define the metrics that matter, how we’re going to measure those metrics, and how we’re going to report on those metrics.
• Technology Requirements — define the technologies needed to empower the strategies defined above.
• Logistics — define which team (client vs. agency) is responsible for what, follow-up action items, setting regular meeting rhythms, etc.

Build

In the Build Stage, we’ll build the foundation needed to empower your digital marketing program. This includes:

• Landing Page Templates
• Email Templates
• Digital Marketing Dashboard
• Marketing Automation Funnel
• Lead Generation Offers
• Website Optimization
• Ad Platforms
• NOTE: The Assess, Plan, and Build stages will only need to be executed once. These stages have a finite “project” period of 45-60 days. Once complete, we’ll move into a monthly “service” period that includes the Drive, • Optimize, and Grow stages below.

Drive

In the Drive Phase, based on your growth objectives, resources, and budget, we’ll drive visits and engagement using some or all of the following methods:

• Email Newsletters/Blasts
• Paid Traffic
• Online PR/Social Media
• Content/SEO
• These methods are listed in priority order with the top methods driving visits and engagement much faster than the bottom methods.

Optimize

Hand-in-hand with the Drive activities, we’ll Optimize your digital marketing program for maximum performance which includes:

• Reporting & Coaching
• Lead Generation Offer Optimization (CTAs, Landing/Thank You Pages)
• Ad Performance Optimization
• CRO (conversion rate optimization)

Grow

Once your program is up-and-running, we’ll strategize additional content and offers to engage existing and/or new buyer personas which includes:

• Consulting on Program Growth
• Targeted Lead Generation Offers and Related Assets
• Content and Features to Support Buyers’ Journeys

Our onboarding process is purpose-built to ensure a smooth transition between sales, finance, and production. An easy and seamless client experience in this transition is of paramount importance.

Our process involves finalizing contracts, connecting with Accounting, assigning dedicated strategists, and conducting thorough kick-off meetings.

Finalizing Contracts:

Upon receiving a signed SOW, your New Business Strategist at Launcharm will connect with the CEO of our company to review the contract, countersign the agreement, and send it back to you for your records.

Accounting:

Within 72 hours of receiving a signed SOW, our Accounting Department will be in touch with a request for initial payment.

Dedicated Strategist:

For multi-service clients, you will be assigned a dedicated Account Strategist as your main point of contact. Unlike the typical “overloaded Account Manager,” your strategist only leads a handful of clients. This allows each strategist the time needed to immerse themselves completely in your brand. Your strategist will act as a seamless extension of your internal team.

Initial Audit & Kickoff Meeting:

Prior to the client kickoff meeting, the team will have requested access to all necessary platforms and reporting tools, which will be used to perform an initial audit of all relevant systems and past marketing activities.

Your account team will come prepared for the workshop-style kickoff meeting (3-6 hours) with additional questions and recommendations on how to prioritize your digital marketing opportunities.

In this meeting, all stakeholders will review a detailed project/service timeline as well as examples of deliverables that will be developed within the first 8 weeks. Additionally, we’ll work through a series of discovery and planning exercises that span subjects such as: sales process and performance, marketing goals and current performance, market segmentation, buyer personas, content marketing, advertising channels, and more.

Along with daily, as-needed communication, we will establish a standing weekly meeting with you and your key stakeholders.

This allows us to set expectations for weekly tasks, deliver incremental reports, and make quick decisions regarding timely needs.

Note: Once-a-month standing meetings may also be established based on your communication preference.

Yes, an exhaustive competitor analysis and benchmark report is a mandatory initiative/service for all new client programs.

We leverage best-in-class tools like Google Analytics, Google Trends, Ahref, SEM Rush, Raven Tools, Moz, ScreamingFrog, Majestic, Sprout Social, Spyfu, SearchMetrics, and more to deliver comprehensive peer analysis, audit reports, forecasting, and future strategy planning.

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We build live, web-based reporting dashboards that act as a single client portal from which all of your digital marketing analytics are reported, giving you 24/7 access to campaign performance and total clarity.

Additionally, weekly analytics analysis is conducted by your dedicated strategist, and monthly reporting review calls are provided.

Most importantly, we provide an executive analytics layer to our reports so that key growth metrics are not glossed over.

This is a very complex question which demands a thorough answer.

But, before we provide marketing budget recommendations, let’s define it: Your marketing budget refers to all costs for marketing, advertising, public relations, event marketing, and anything else you might leverage to promote the brand and drive revenue.

Based on the latest research, our expert opinions, and years of marketing experience, we, generally, recommend:

You should spend 2 to 5 percent of your sales revenue on marketing.

The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends spending 7 to 8 percent of your gross revenue if you’re garnering less than $5 million a year in sales and your net profit margin—after all expenses—is in the 10 percent to 12 percent range. For new companies (startups), especially those in competitive markets, these numbers increase to 12 to 20 percent. For established companies, you should be spending 6 to 12 percent of gross revenue on marketing.

What about digital marketing specific budgets?

According to Forrester Research, most industries such as design and media, transportation, retail, health and beauty, real estate, information technology, agriculture and environment, and building and construction dedicate 50 to 65 percent of their overall marketing budget to digital marketing specifically.

When working with Digitopia, if you haven’t already defined an annual marketing budget, we will build one with you collaboratively. This budget will be derived from real, meaningful, benchmark data that we plug into a business math formula to determine your COCA (Cost of Customer Acquisition). Some example metrics within the formula include:

• Monthly Website Visits
• Visit-to-Lead Conversion/Sale Percentage
• Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Percentage
• Opportunity-to-Customer Conversion Percentage
• Average Initial Order/Contract Value (IOV)
• Average Lifetime Value (LTV)

From here, we can begin to determine necessary, profitable budgets based on your goals and benchmark data, and begin to project marketing ROI as well.

We determine success metrics for all program activities by performing a COCA (cost of customer acquisition) analysis prior to any contracting.

We consider metrics like the LTR (lifetime revenue) of our client’s customers, our client’s gross margin, LTV (lifetime value), and COCA% to determine a max COCA$ that ensures a program with eventual ROI.

For lead generation campaigns, we also consider monthly objectives like website visitors, leads, qualified leads, opportunities, and customers along with the conversion rate at each point.

Paid/direct response KPI examples would include metrics such as impression-share, CPC, CTR, landing page engagement, and conversions.

We track KPI’s through a varied tool stack that includes, Google Analytics, Shopify Analytics, HubSpot, and more.

Absolutely!

If we cannot help you with your marketing needs, we will help you get in touch with someone who can.

We have built an extensive network of agency partners who we work with regularly and trust.

SEO

If you own a business or manage a website of any kind, you likely want target audiences to visit it. SEO is important because it’s specifically aimed at helping do just this; improve the online presence and traffic for a website.

SEO helps you show up at the most important stage of your customer’s journey, when they are actively looking for products and services you offer, or resources and information for which you have expert insights.

The Beginning (0-6 months):

The first 6 months of any SEO effort is almost always exclusively dedicated to fixing mistakes, fine tuning, and closing the gap between what your website has in place and current SEO best practices.

Once completed, these efforts can have ongoing and compounding benefits for years to come. The newly accessible and optimized pages start earning rankings and traffic, which foster more links, more exposure, more sharing, and more business.

The Turning Point (6-18 months):

Eventually, the list of actionable, immediate fixes, and optimizations depletes. At this point, your website will hit an “SEO Plateau.”

In order to reach the next growth plateau (between campaign months 6-18), you must invest in new strategies, such as:

• New Keywords & Content
• New Verticals & SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Features
• Additional SERP Domination
• Moving Up the Buyer Funnel
• International/Multi-Language Targeting

Local SEO is a hyper-specific tactic that focuses on optimizing your website to achieve local search rankings by ensuring that your business is properly represented on review sites like Yelp, City Search, Kudzoo, and others.

Your Local SEO Expert focuses on making sure that your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) are correct and consistent across these listings so Google indexes your business information and website appropriately.

SEO as a broader practice focuses on optimizing your content – your blog and your website content, in general – to ensure it’s fresh, accurate, and interesting for search engines.

Our SEO approach calls for segmenting organic search traffic/queries, and therefore website engagement, into 1 of 4 buckets, Google calls these query categories “micro-moments:”

1. “I want to know”
2. “I want to go”
3. “I want to do”
4. “I want to buy”
We leverage industry trends and insights on the search behavior from these micro-moments to guide on-page optimization strategy for relevant pages, to build funnels, and to segment users to appropriate landing pages that are hyper-relevant to their query.

As an example, for an eCommerce client, our keyword research and focus may center around “I want to buy” intent/queries. As a result, we would optimize intent/action-based pages (product pages) around purchase-related keyword queries and topics to best serve the user and improve relevance with Google.

From each query, we can extrapolate intent. Furthermore, each page should serve a very specific function and play a unique role in the user’s buyer’s journey whether they are in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage.

A homepage, as another example, is typically serving branded/reputation-based keyword queries and search intent, and aligns with the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.

A blog post, for example, serves education-based keyword queries and search intent, and aligns with the awareness and consideration stages of the buyer’s journey.

We work to understand how we can best position the website to serve users with relevant content at the optimal stage of their journey, identify what KPI’s should we be measuring to demonstrate increased engagement, and focus on how can we improve performance over time.

Tools & Partnerships

We are a HubSpot Platinum Tier certified partner agency with 15 managed clients.

We have extensive HubSpot Marketing experience, including the development of an “Implementation Playbook,” that allows stakeholders to deploy campaigns in a systematic fashion.

Everyone on the team is HubSpot trained and certified. Additionally, we are called-upon by HubSpot and other organizations to speak as thought leaders.

We’re a certified Google partner agency managing close to 1 million dollars in annual client ad spend.

With team-wide certifications across Google’s entire suite of ad products, Search, Display, Mobile, Video, and Shopping, we’re able to connect with a wide variety of our clients’ target audiences at the optimal stage of their buyers journey to effectively drive brand awareness, website engagement, lead generation and sales.

We have a large and varied digital marketing tool stack to assist with reporting, client communications, file sharing, campaign planning, campaign tracking, trend monitoring, analytics insights, CRO, and more. Here are just a few examples:

• Google Drive
• Google Analytics
• Google Data Studio
• Google Trends
• Google Tag manager
• Google Ads + Keyword Planner
• Google Optimize
• Facebook Pixel Helper
• Sprout Social
• Hootsuite
• HeyOrca
• Buffer
• Buzzsumo
• Ahrefs
• SEM Rush
• Lucky Orange
• Screaming Frog
• Tag Assistant
• Moz Local
• Moz Pro
• Bright Local
• HubSpot Blog
• HubSpot Analytics
• HubSpot Marketing Software & Sales CRM
• Slack
• Dropbox
• Basecamp
• Canva
• Adobe Suite

Contact us

Partner with Us for digital marketing

We’re happy to answer any questions you may have and help you determine which of our services best fit your needs.

Call us at: 1-302-520-3383
Your benefits:
  • Client-oriented
  • Independent
  • Competent
  • Results-driven
  • Problem-solving
  • Transparent
What happens next?
1

We Schedule a call at your convenience 

2

We do a discovery and consulting meting 

3

We prepare a proposal 

Schedule a Free Consultation