Strategic planning helps organizations determine where to focus their resources and efforts over the next year and beyond and outlines the plan for how to get there. The strategic planning process can be organization-wide or focused on a business unit, division, department, product line or product portfolio. 

Strategic planning services offered by Captivate Communications include both long-range and short-range planning.  While each strategic planning project is tailored to the needs of the client and the project, typical projects include a SWOT analysis, reported findings and action plan; facilitated collaborative exercises to help the organization or team to develop mission, vision and value statements;  guidance and coaching in establishing SMART goals that align with the agreed-upon strategic direction; and developing an action plan that marries the objectives and goals to specific executions or tactics.

Our strategic planning services help clients—in particular small to mid-sized businesses experiencing growing pains—expand their businesses into new markets, launch new products, identify market needs for new products that align with the core product offering and much, much more.

Creating a brand identity or evolving existing perceptions about a longstanding brand can be challenging but is increasingly important to the success of business development and marketing efforts of organizations of all sizes and scope.  Branding and brand building includes everything from cultivating the positive emotions your brand evokes in consumers to eliminating any negative brand equity that may be associated with a brand.

Captivate Communications offers branding services that help clients develop a complete branding strategy including developing a brand and product architecture, a launch or migration plan and tactical implementation project plan, and collaboration with and management of creative agencies to develop the brand guidelines.  These are just a few primary areas where Captivate can offer support.

We have proven experience in developing integrated marketing plans for organizations or specific product lines within larger organizations.  When we develop a plan for your business, you’ll receive a coordinated, highly-targeted multi-channel marketing program based on your marketing budget that includes mass media advertising campaigns (TV, radio, print, outdoor, online sponsorships), search engine optimization and marketing recommendations, public relations and thought leadership programs, direct marketing strategies (print and email), viral or guerilla marketing, and other emerging market outreach programs such as webinars, blogs, RSS, podcasts, and Internet TV.  Depending on your organization’s needs, we can also provide support on the execution of the integrated marketing plan we’ve developed including refinements to the plan and the budget.

We offer direct marketing project management including developing the campaign objectives, budget, messaging, communications schedule, concepting, design, copy development, production and post-campaign ROI analysis.

Identify a list of competitors, and we can conduct an in-depth competitive analysis for your business, leveraging data you have and collecting the information you don’t have that we’ll acquire for you.  We work with you to identify your competitors, categorize them based on criteria defined in collaboration with you, compare and contrast your business to the competition, identify opportunities and recommendations based on findings.  Parameters for analysis could include geographic reach, pricing, product offering, and feature/function comparisons.

Many organizations need event planning support whether planning a sales meeting, advisory board meeting, corporate training or hosting educational conferences and seminars for clients and prospects.  Captivate Communications can handle all facets of your event needs from strategic planning, to budget and contract management, facilities and services, logistics management, program creation, and post-event ROI analysis.

While different clients have different needs depending on their experience and available internal resources, typical event planning activities provided by Captivate Communications include:

• General project management and budget management for the event with weekly reporting and status meetings with key stakeholders,

• Event promotion and attendee and sponsor recruitment activities,

• General event management,

• Speaker and program management.

Captivate Communications offers a variety of copywriting services including:

• Technical writing to help clients articulate business and product ideas into actionable requirement specifications;
• Business writing, including authorship of business cases, strategy and market opportunity proposals for senior management;
• Writing for the web which also includes helping clients develop site and page level content strategies for the web;
• And general promotional copywriting which can include slogans, headlines, direct mail pieces, taglines, commercials (TV or radio), scripts, press releases, white papers and other written material for advertising and product/company promotion.