Outsource projects
The piece gets finished. But it’s not part of a strategy.
A website. A brochure. Stop-and-start social media. Projects like these are often outsourced and completed without being connected by an overarching strategy.
Approach
Strategy before tactics. Understand the business, agree on what it can credibly say, and only then decide what marketing to produce.
- “Where do we even start?”
- “How do we build our prospect list?”
- “What’s the overall plan?”
Don’t start with the piece. Start with the business.
A website, a brochure, a LinkedIn post, or an ad can all be useful. None of them is a strategy. When those pieces are produced one at a time, they often fail to answer a simpler question: what does this business need customers to understand, and why should they care?
Mullin Marketing begins there. The Creative Brief is the tool. It is how leadership and marketing arrive at the same definition of the business before anyone chooses a channel.
Your traditional imperfect choices.
Many growing businesses recognize the need for better marketing but don’t have senior marketing leadership internally. That often leaves two imperfect choices.
Hire inexperience
You have a marketing person. Do you have the time for all their questions?
A junior or mid-level marketer may be capable of executing activities but often bring more questions than answers. You need marketing to generate leads but you shouldn’t have to manage it.
More capabilities make strategy more important. Not less.
AI, CRM, targeted outreach, automation, Codex and vibe coding have dramatically expanded what businesses can do with marketing—and how quickly they can do it.
That makes a strong marketing strategy more important than ever. When these capabilities are guided by a clear understanding of the business, its customers, its value propositions and its goals, they can work together in ways that weren’t possible before.
The Creative Brief
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Target audience(s)
Who buys what you sell? Who can refer you to the right person? Who can bring you into the conversation? This, by the way, is the lynchpin to the whole thing.
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Customer assumptions
What does your target audience know, think and feel about you? Let’s add some perspective to our starting point in this marketing process.
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Value propositions
Let’s define 4-5 key selling points that are specific, defensible, and agreed upon by the key stakeholders in your business. This is the most difficult part of the brief process.
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Supporting evidence
You sell quality products or services? Prove it. Your years of experience matters? How? Good marketing delivers facts and supporting evidence.
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Brand character
Defines how the company should sound and behave, so the website, the outreach, the sales material, and the content feel like one organization.
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Competitive context
Looks at what buyers compare the company with, and which claims hold up in that context.
Different people inside a company often describe its value differently. Someone may be sure the organization is strong in an area and still be unable to show why a customer should believe it. The brief forces that conversation. It separates what the company believes about itself from what it can credibly prove.
Reaching agreement is not always easy. That is part of the value. Once leadership agrees, the completed brief becomes a shared definition of who the organization is, who it serves, what makes it valuable, and what it can claim. The marketing that follows is built on that foundation.
Let’s talk.
Whether you know exactly what you need or you’re not sure where to start, let’s talk about your business and where marketing can help.
