Find the real marketing problem before you spend another dollar solving the wrong one
A half-day working session at your business. Two weeks of research with professional search, audience, and AI visibility tools. Then a prioritized marketing plan for your next 30 days, 90 days, year, and three years, with honest expectations attached to every recommendation.
No pitch deck. We ask about your business, you ask about ours, and we both find out if this is a fit.
In search marketing since 2005 | Client relationships running 10 years and longer | Based in Fredericksburg, Texas, working nationwide
You built a business that works. So why does the marketing feel like guesswork?
The regulars come back. Referrals still arrive. The reviews run warm. And the marketing happens one decision at a time: an ad someone suggested, a sponsorship because they asked, a website refresh that stalled in March.
If any of these sound familiar, you are the business we built this for:
- You could name your last three marketing purchases, and none of you could say which ones produced customers.
- Someone asks ChatGPT or Google for “best places like yours” and you have no idea how your name comes up.
- Your customer base is aging with you, and the audience you want next has different habits you have never mapped.
- Every agency you have talked to arrived with the solution already decided before anyone asked what was wrong.
(That last one is the industry’s bad habit, and it is the reason this service exists.)
You cannot solve a problem until you state it
In 1969, a Texas architect named William Peña published a slim book called Problem Seeking. His firm had learned, on hundreds of buildings, that projects fail when design starts before the problem is defined. So they separated the two. First a disciplined discovery process with the client in the room, ending in a written statement of the problem. Then, and only then, design. The method became the standard for architectural programming and is still taught today.
We run your marketing the same way. Before anyone proposes a tactic, we define the problem: in a working session at your business, with the people who own it and the people who face your customers. Everything in the sessions documented and then tested against real data.
That is why we named this engagement Groundwork. It is the work you do before you build.
There is a second discipline underneath it. Reinventing. We have all felt change the last few years. Research from the Reinvention Academy, where our founder holds a Certified Reinvention Associate credential, finds most companies now need to reinvent parts of their business every three years or less. Not a new tactic or pivot, but reinvent or risk collapsing. Marketing built for the market of 2022 won’t get you where you need to go, and the owners who feel that are usually right.
Search now means – every place someone asks a question
We are a search agency first. That used to mean Google rankings or top placement in ads. Today your customers ask Google, Google Maps, ChatGPT, Instagram, YouTube, review sites, booking platforms, and their phone’s voice assistant. Each one is a place your business is either present or absent, and each one can be measured.
We see the part most have never seen: Google and the AI systems have already classified your business. They have decided what you are, who you compare to, and when to recommend you, based on everything published about you anywhere. Part of this engagement is showing you that classification and measuring the gap between how you position your business and how the machines describe it. For most clients, seeing that report is the moment the plan makes sense.
What you get
- A half-day discovery session at your business. Structured, recorded, and facilitated. We cover your history, your goals, your audience, your numbers, your competitors, what you have tried that worked, and what failed. Your front-line people get their own segment, because they hear things owners never do.
- A marketing readiness diagnostic. Before the session, each of your key people scores fifteen plain-language statements about how marketing really happens in your business. The spread between their answers tells us as much as the scores.
- Two weeks of verification research. We test what we heard against the data: who your audience actually is (using audience research and your analytics), which competitors actually occupy your search space (including who the AI assistants recommend instead of you), how the machines classify your brand, and how your website, reviews, listings, and video presence hold up. If the research shows your website itself is the constraint, we tell you and scope that separately rather than padding this engagement.
- A working call to test the findings. About a week to ten days after the session, before anything is final, we bring you the draft problem statements and the surprises. You push back. The plan gets better.
- The plan. A written report and a live walkthrough: what we verified about where you stand, the problem stated in plain language, and prioritized recommendations for the next 30 days, 90 days, year, and three years. Every recommendation names its expected outcome as a range, because anyone who promises you a single number is guessing with confidence.
You own all of it. Use it with us, with your team, or with another firm. The plan is your guide and stands on its own.
Rule one: if it is working, we will not break it
Page one of your plan lists everything we verified is working, and our commitment to leave it alone. Established businesses have been burned by consultants who declare everything wrong to justify their fee. Some of what built your business still works. Proving which parts, so you can protect them with confidence, is half the value of the research.
How it works
- Before we arrive: a short intake, your numbers, and the diagnostic. About two hours of your team’s time, spread over a week.
- Week one: the on-site session, two to four hours depending on the size of your operation.
- Weeks one and two: our research. Your only job is granting a few account accesses.
- Around day ten: the one-hour working call.
- Week three: delivery, in person or on video. We schedule your 90-day review before we leave.
Who this fits
Our clients are established small and mid-sized organizations that want a strategic partner rather than a vendor: wineries, tasting rooms, luxury hotels, venues, and food and wine businesses across the Texas Hill Country and beyond, along with the nonprofits, healthcare practices, and B2B firms we have served for years. The work is bigger than a template audit and smaller than a six-month consulting engagement, priced at $4,500 with travel billed at cost outside the Hill Country. A remote version exists for businesses outside Texas; the on-site session is better, and we will say so.
If your marketing budget is under $15,000 a year, this engagement is probably heavier than you need, and we will tell you that on the introductory call rather than take the booking.
About WHO Digital Strategy
WHO Digital Strategy is a boutique search marketing agency in Fredericksburg, Texas, run by practitioners who have done this work since 2005. We manage SEO, AI search optimization, local search, Google Ads, and digital advertising for clients who stay with us for years, on month-to-month terms, in accounts the clients own. We teach as we work; you will understand every recommendation and the reasoning behind it. Our founder began her career in architecture, which is where she first learned the discipline this engagement is built on.
Frequently asked questions
What is Groundwork?
Groundwork is WHO Digital Strategy’s marketing discovery intensive: a fixed-scope engagement that defines your marketing problem before recommending solutions. It combines a facilitated half-day session at your business, two weeks of audience, competitor, and AI visibility research, and a prioritized plan covering the next 30 days, 90 days, year, and three years. It costs $4,500.
How is this different from a marketing audit?
An audit inspects your existing marketing and grades it. This engagement starts earlier: with your goals, your customers, your economics, and your competitors, then uses research to define the actual problem. An audit tells you what is broken in the machine you have. Discovery asks whether you have the right machine for your future.
How much does it cost?
$4,500, fixed. Plus travel at cost for on-sites beyond the Texas Hill Country. There is nothing to renew and no retainer requirement; some clients hire us afterward to execute the plan, and some take it to their own team.
Who needs to be in the room?
The owner or final decision-maker, whoever runs marketing, and whoever owns sales or revenue. We also ask for twenty minutes with one or two front-line staff. In our experience the gap between what owners believe and what front-line people observe is one of the most useful findings in the entire engagement.
Do you only work with hospitality businesses?
No. Hospitality and wineries are our deep specialty, and the method works anywhere people search for answers before they buy. Our client base includes nonprofits, healthcare practices, and B2B firms, several for more than a decade.
What do you need from us?
About two hours of pre-work spread across a week, the session itself, and login access to your analytics and marketing accounts, which stay in your name and your ownership. We work in your accounts as managers; we never hold them.
What happens after the plan is delivered?
The plan includes a 90-day review where we measure results against the ranges we published. From there you can run the plan yourself, hire us month-to-month to execute parts of it, or rerun discovery when your business changes. Nothing obligates you to work with us again, which is exactly why most clients do.
