The Benefits of an Ascension Program Versus a Marketing Retainer

As a small business owner, you know that marketing is vital to the success and growth of your business. But what’s the best way to go about building marketing services into your business?

You have options:

1. If you have a strong knowledge of marketing, you can hire specific marketing services on retainer from agencies, or
2. You can hire and build an internal team of marketing staff within your company, and/or
3. You can join our Ascension Program, giving you benefits of both.

Our ascension program was built after hearing so many business owners share their challenges that the marketing services, they purchased from other agencies just didn’t give them the results they were after, and so they tried to build their own team – often still not achieving the results they sought.

The missing gap for many is the confidence, knowledge, and experience of HOW.

This is what our Ascension Program is designed to provide to you.

The Program is built across five (5) phases of growth enabling businesses to join at their stage of growth.

Here we explore where it is best for you to join.

Our aim is to walk with you, at your pace, some seek very fast growth, others want to progress a little slower. We will start you at the correct point and help you move across all five layers of growth.

Phase 1. Educate: Typically for very small businesses under $200k in revenues.

Our first aim is to build you the confidence and knowledge of how to go about achieving growth past $200k in revenues.

When signing up for a marketing retainer, you’re generally only paying for someone to execute on a set number of tasks each month, and you need to tell them which ones. With our ascension program, you are receiving one-on-one access to a growth coach who will strategize with you and educate you on the best way to achieve growth and help you move into the next phase of growth.

Phase 2. Launch: Your revenues are typically $200k-$800k

The Launch phase of our ascension program gives you the experience, knowledge, and resources you need to launch new products, services, and marketing campaigns quickly. What we want at this phase is solid growth.

We find the marketing retainer option at this stage of growth is less strategic and more of the support being a line item on a punch list – it becomes hit and miss and thus the disappointment in results.

We have chosen to build support around you with more dedicated resources, someone who is focused on your continued growth and specializes in launching campaigns, automations, and customer journeys. This phase requires you to consolidate your position in the marketplace, you must have the confidence now to really launch your marketing services.

Phase 3. Promote: Businesses with revenues above $800k can start here.

Revenues are typically $1-3m during this phase.

Now you really want to promote the business and drive in sales growth.

The Promote phase of our ascension program provides you with tangible assets, more robust resources, and a deeper knowledge of how you need to promote your business effectively. This phase is primarily focused on campaigning throughout your customer journey. Promoting your business can be a full-time job, so having an agency that is an extension to your team and who knows your products, services, and processes intimately can be a major advantage. At this stage our marketing team will develop targeted campaigns to help you reach your ideal customers to collect more leads, convert more clients, and create long term fans.

And we start the conversation with you now about how to build your internal team, at this size you now want to recruit some internal resources that can leverage the work you are doing. At this point we create the roadmap for building your internal team.

Phase 4. Partner: Businesses with revenues of $3m-6m typically start here.

While others on the Ascension program have now grown up to this stage.

At $3m in revenues the only way to continue to achieve growth is to start to add more product lines into the company and to open up partnerships that can help you expand.

In this phase of the ascension program, our team is deeply involved in helping you to campaign, automate, and build customer journeys across each of your marketing channels. This is where we help you identify and recruit partnerships with other businesses in complementary industries to cross-promote each other’s products or services. We are crafting custom marketing strategies and refining your unique value proposition that clearly articulates the offerings of your business and what makes you an attractive partner. Ultimately, we help you to optimize and productize your partnerships for growth.

Phase 5. Scale: You are now well above $6m in revenue. Businesses with current revenues of $10-25m+ typically start here.

Take a moment to acknowledge how far you’ve come. Scaling a business is no easy feat, but you made it to the top of our ascension program. In this phase we’re focused on helping you to develop an integrated internal team that helps you scale in your sector.

There are some common obstacles that prevent most businesses from achieving this level of growth and scalability. At this stage we are tapping into new markets to expand your product offerings and customer base. We’re helping you to invest in new technologies and processes that improve efficiency and competitiveness while also helping you to attract top talent and build a strong leadership team.

The benefits of our ascension program and its return on investment can be measured in several ways. Our focus is to build you a lifetime of confidence, vision, knowledge, and experience that delivers less stress, more guidance, more strategic direction, and sustainable financial growth. Clients see benefits from this program for many years to come.

Here are four key measurements of growth that are experienced when investing in our ascension program:

• More Sales – clients that invest in marketing see sales revenues go up; this is called Top Line growth.
• More Margin – this is cash in the door, it is called Bottom Line growth – profits. Automation and systemization can increase a client’s margins without the need to increase sales; and this has a direct impact on the financial returns of the client.
• More Time – equally automation and systemization, reducing a client’s manual labor can save the client direct costs but can also save them considerable time. This is ‘opportunity cost’ – time saved and reinvested back into the business to achieve more sales creates direct financial benefits for the client.
• More Value – this can show up in two ways a) the building of assets within a company builds long-term value which in turn will show up as increased attractiveness; this makes recruitment easier, retention longer, more partners are attracted to the company, more sponsors etc; and b) increased equity value, increasing the sale price of the company when it sells.

Conclusion:

As you can see, our ascension program is ideal for businesses that are looking for growth. Whether it’s sales growth, margin growth or value growth – we’ll help you to gradually scale your business while instilling a lifetime of confidence, knowledge, and experience.

Ascension is not a typical coaching program or business consultancy. We focus on real, sustainable results that will help you take your business to the next level. Our program is specifically tailored to meet the unique needs of each client, and our team of growth experts has a wealth of experience across nearly every industry and vertical.