The Diagnostic: How This 2 Week Project Will Help You Get a Better Understanding of Your Digital Marketing
We start nearly all of our client engagements with a 2 week project called a Diagnostic.
This is because as a content marketing agency, we’ve found that it can be hard to get a full understanding of the opportunity for content within a company based solely on a 45 minute conversation.
It’s also hard for a company’s marketing team – who have to take care of 100+ other things, which content is just a small part of – to understand what their gaps are within content marketing and how an agency can best solve those.
With this 2 week, £1,000 / $1,200 project, we’re able to better understand a company’s digital marketing landscape, identify the opportunities for content and decide on an engagement scope together with the client that will meet those goals. It’s a project that doesn’t require a lot of time or resources from the company, and there is no further commitment once the Diagnostic is complete.
Specifically, our objective with the Diagnostic is answer three key questions:
What’s working and what isn’t working across your SEO, content and Google Ads?
What’s the opportunity, across your SEO, content and Google Ads?
How can we execute on that opportunity?
In this article, we'll go into more detail about what the Diagnostic entails, what are the main benefits for the client, and what the outcome looks like.
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What do you get from a Diagnostic?
For those who don’t know Mint Studios, we’re a content marketing agency that focuses on helping fintech and financial services companies acquire customers with content. We do this via Bottom of the Funnel content, SEO and Google Ads.
What differentiates us from other content marketing agencies are three key elements:
We are fintech and financial services focused: this allows us to hit the ground running with clients and produce advanced content for an advanced audience (which is crucial in financial services). Read case studies of our work with financial clients here: Our Results
We focus on generating leads with content: this allows clients to measure and prove the impact of content and invest in an activity that helps grow the business.
We take care of the whole content spectrum, from strategy, writing, editing, publishing and reporting: this allows the internal marketers to focus on their main job and not have to worry about finding and training writers, creating a strategy or publishing.
You can read more about how we work here: Our Methodology
When we have an initial conversation with a client, we only get a broad overview of their marketing situation. With the Diagnostic, we’re able to get a lot more specific and find the information we need to put together a proposal that is a lot more aligned with the client’s goals.
Before we started doing Diagnostics, we were facing issues like:
We’d often uncover key customer pain points or gaps in the client’s marketing a few months down the line that would require us to adjust the content strategy and delay results.
There would be a lack of alignment on how feasible the goals were, leading to a mismatch in expectations.
Most clients wouldn’t know the answer to the question “how many leads is your content currently generating?”, which made it hard to put together a proposal focused on a lead goal.
It could often be harder for the company’s marketing team to make a case to leadership for investing in content marketing.
As a content agency that focuses on customer acquisition, it’s incredibly important that we understand our client’s target customers, their pain points, what marketing channels work well for the company so that we can correctly evaluate whether Bottom of the Funnel content can work well for them.
With the Diagnostic, we can more adequately assess whether it makes more sense for the client to invest more in SEO, Google Ads or a different channel, and then from there, what a realistic goal is and how much investment the client needs to commit to in order to reach that goal. This allows us to be more aligned with the client from day one, and put together a proposal that is a lot more in line with what is achievable.
By the end of that two-week project, as a client you would get:
A presentation of findings and recommendations that answers these three questions (what is and isn’t working, what’s the opportunity and how to execute on the opportunity) in the form of
Summary of our findings across paid and organic channels
Content topic ideas (including keywords) and recommendations
SEO recommendations
Google Ads recommendations
Suggested organic and paid strategy
Estimation of investment required to reach goal (if possible)
HubSpot and Google Analytics reporting set up for attribution
A proposal on how to move forward
In that way, you'll have:
A clear summary of what is and isn’t working across three of your marketing activities: SEO, content marketing and Google Ads
A clear explanation of what the economic opportunity is, and a proposed strategy on how to execute it
All the reporting and tracking set up so you can track results from these three marketing activities accurately moving forward
A proposal that is a lot more aligned with your goals, describing the three marketing strategies we can work on together
Here’s what we’ve heard clients value the most from the Diagnostic:
You get a good overview of what is and isn’t working via a straightforward summary
Many clients complain to us they’re tired of 10-page SEO reports with too many numbers and metrics that they don’t care about. You know the ones we’re talking about: multiple graphs, tables and numbers that ultimately don’t factor into the metrics that you are held accountable for: leads, SQLs, revenue.
Our deck is straightforward and simple. We often like to have one slide that says, “You’re getting X leads per month via Google Ads and Y leads via SEO.” We can also go through how many are turning into deals, and the estimated business value.
We’ll keep it simple and focus on the metrics what you really care about.
You get to see how marketing metrics connect to business metrics
We don’t just look at traffic and say “traffic is going up”. We’ll actually connect your marketing metrics to business metrics. Whether we source your marketing metrics via HubSpot, Salesforce (or just estimations if only that’s possible), we’ll translate your marketing metrics all into financial numbers so you can actually use those for board meetings and leadership meetings. This helps to get buy-in from leadership, and makes it more relevant and credible to certain stakeholders since we’re using the same language as they are.
For example, we had one client where Google Ads was bringing in over $1m in business opportunity, which we could track via Salesforce. By analysing the non-branded keywords that were bringing in opportunities, we could put a financial number on how many opportunities content and SEO would bring it, putting it at $500k+.
You can read more about how to do this here: How to Make a Business Case for Content Marketing (With Examples)
You can refer to a comprehensive dashboard that shows you the numbers you care about at a glance
It’s hard to prove the contribution of content and SEO to the business. Without the right setup, you’re mainly relying on metrics that don’t automatically translate to business, such as traffic and rankings. This is why at Mint Studios, we set up the dashboard for you based on the tools you use, so you can get access to all the right information from one place that is simple to understand at a glance.
If you have HubSpot or Salesforce,you can finally get the numbers you care about, such as:
How many deals is my content helping to bring in?
How much is content influencing deals?
Which content topics bring in the best quality leads?
For every client we work with, we set up a “Content Dashboard” in HubSpot and Salesforce with the various reports to answer the questions above.
You can find out all this information in HubSpot. Unfortunately, HubSpot doesn't have any guides on their website on how to set up these reports specifically for content marketing, so there’s a risk you spend hours trying to set it all up yourself.
We’ve been doing this enough time that we know what types of reports are the most valuable from a content perspective, and we can always add new reports that you may request.
For example, we had one client ask us for a report where “We want to see which HubSpot contacts viewed over 10 pages and haven’t converted to a sale yet, along with which one of our team members is allocated to that lead, that way we can let them know to follow up.” We were able to set up a report with that exact information, allowing them to reach out to “warm” leads who were more likely to convert.
We also know GA4 is difficult to understand, making event tracking like contact form submissions tricky to get right. We'll take care of your tracking configuration so you can be sure to trace the right events back to content marketing and Google Ads.
Even Salesforce can be tricky to use if that's your marketing tool of choice. Depending on your level of account we know a couple of workarounds if we’re not able to set up the dashboards.
Read more: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 6 HubSpot Reports]
You get a proposal that is aligned with your goals
As mentioned earlier, one of our key differentiators as a content marketing agency is that we don’t just create content: we’re focused on lead generation and we carefully track the leads we’re bringing in every month.
This means that your lead to close conversion rate, traffic and lead numbers play a big part in our strategy.
Before we were doing Diagnostics, it was a lot harder to link our proposal to specific financial numbers. The risk was we’d end up having to link it to numbers like traffic, which don’t always directly link to the metrics that brand marketers are held accountable for.
By spending 2 weeks going through the business numbers, we can put together a much more comprehensive proposal that is better aligned with your goals.
For instance, with one client, we saw that there was a much bigger opportunity in optimising some of their existing content for lead generation, rather than focusing so much on net new pieces. Because we could already see the impact of their existing content and we understood their goals, we were able to put together a proposal aligned with their goals that leaned more towards optimising their existing content rather than creating brand new pieces.
The Diagnostic also allows us to set realistic goals so we know we’re on track. We’ll typically start an engagement with an initial goal of the number of leads we want to hit per month – a number we're able to predict more accurately thanks to the Diagnostic, which means we’re more likely to succeed and to hit those goals.
You get to test what it’s like to work with us before committing to an engagement
Working with a brand new agency can be scary. You’ve never worked with this team before, so you don’t know if their communication style fits yours, if they are truly “on the ball” and if the quality is what you expect.
We understand that a client engagement is all about the people, which means you don’t really know if an engagement will work until you know the people.
One of the additional benefits of the Diagnostic is that it allows both parties to work on a quick project before committing to a full engagement. Therefore both parties ensure they are a good fit before beginning work.
There is no required commitment after the Diagnostic. So, if you don't feel we're a good fit, we part ways after the project ends.
What happens during the Diagnostic?
Here’s what a Diagnostic typically includes:
One kick-off call
One interview with an internal expert who understands customer pain points (typically a salesperson)
Website content audit
Content and SEO audit
Competitive analysis
HubSpot and Google Analytics audit
Google Ads audit
Keyword research
On our end, we spend the first week of the Diagnostic interviewing people on your team who have a deep understanding of your target customer and pain points. This allows us to do much more in-depth content and keyword research.
During that week, we’ll also set up access to Google Ads, Analytics, etc. We’ll configure all the reports and tracking to make sure we can perform a complete analysis.
The second week is when we analyze all the data, interviews and any resources you share with us. At the end of the second week and of the whole project, we’ll do a 1-hour content strategy call where we present all our findings and next steps.
We usually divide our findings and recommendations into a few sections
General diagnosis
What is and isn’t working for organic search
The opportunities for organic search
What is and isn’t working for paid
The opportunities for paid
Your objective, how feasible it is
Our suggested strategy
You’ll also get access to all our analysis, which includes
Content calendar, including keywords, topic ideas
Content and high level SEO audit
Competitive analysis
Google Ads audit
Content results (with tracking)
Even if you decide not go ahead with Mint Studios, you’ll still have access to all those materials and can implement them yourself.
What is your commitment?
Another reason clients love the Diagnostic is that it doesn’t require a huge time and resources commitment. You don’t have to ask each person on your leadership team to allocate 1 hour to an interview. You don’t need to give us access to customers or get 10+ approvals from different people.
The time commitment required for the Diagnostic is minimal and would include only the people on your team who are relevant to this project. The entire Diagnostic comprehends from you:
Joining a 30-minute kick off call
Helping set up a 45-minute interview with a salesperson
Helping to get access to tools such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, etc.
Joining a Slack/Teams channel to facilitate communication during the two week period
Attending a final one-hour strategy presentation
The Diagnostic costs £1,000 / $1,200 and as mentioned, there is no further commitment afterwards.
If you do decide to work together, we can also hit the ground running since a lot of the strategy work is already done. This avoids you spending additional time on strategy once you’re ready to get started.
Interested? Here’s the PDF with all the details
If you're interested in going ahead with the Diagnostic, here's a PDF that you can download and share with team members: Download Mint Studios Diagnostic
You can reach out to us via our website or reach out to araminta@mintcopywritingstudios.com to get started.
What our customers say
Gregory Aubert, Head of Marketing at Yapily:
“We were looking to diversify our inbound marketing and wanted to invest more in SEO and content.
The Diagnostic was a great way for us to clearly understand where our gaps were and what the business opportunity (with financial numbers attached) of investing in content marketing was.
Mint Studios succinctly summarised their findings and also put together a clear strategy and plan to help achieve our goals, which we are now implementing together”
Elaine Tighe, Head of Marketing at fscom:
“Although we were already investing in Google Ads and SEO, it was hard to get a good overview of what was really driving inbound results.
The Diagnostic helped us get a good understanding of what was truly driving new business, which pages performed best and what were the opportunities to get better results.
Mint Studios also helped set up HubSpot reports which we now regularly use to create our marketing reporting and strategy.”
Who should do a Diagnostic?
We believe a Diagnostic makes sense if you:
Know you are planning to invest in SEO / content / Google Ads but are unsure on what the potential opportunity is and how much effort to dedicate to each channel.
Want to work with us but don’t fully understand the value of what we do or you want to test working with us.
Want to invest in SEO / content / Google Ads, but leadership wants you to provide data and models on what value it’ll provide.
Want to see if SEO / content / Google Ads are a good channel to invest in.
Want to learn more? Reach out below.