Marketing Consulting for Small Businesses
Marketing Essentials | Starting at $1,500/month
You don’t need someone to fully take over your marketing. You just need a senior partner with enough experience to identify what’s working, call out what isn’t, and tell you exactly what to do next.
A Marketing Strategy That’s Built Around Your Brand Goals
Most brand owners we talk to aren’t struggling with their marketing because they don’t care or it isn’t a priority. They’re struggling because they’re already doing everything else, and their marketing keeps getting shortchanged as a result.
Marketing Essentials is built for the brand owner who knows their business and can execute a plan, but isn’t at the stage where bringing someone in-house makes financial sense. You get a senior marketing partner who understands your goals and your product well enough to build a strategy around them, and to hold you and your team accountable to seeing it through.
Our Strategic Marketing Approach
Our approach doesn’t change based on your level of investment. Good marketing is good marketing, and that’s true whether you’re spending $1,000 a month or $10,000. When you partner with us, here’s what you get:
You get a senior marketing partner who learns your business, not an account manager who’s learning marketing.
Agencies love to skip the hard part. They rush into execution because activity feels like progress, they have the templates ready to go, and it’s easier to bill for deliverables than discovery. The problem is that building anything on a cracked foundation is how marketing budgets get wasted. Before anything gets built or recommended, we do the work to actually understand where your brand is at right now. It may take a bit longer to get into execution, but what gets built will actually work.
You get marketing direction that tells you what you need, not just does what you ask.
When a client asks most marketing agencies to jump, the response is “how high?” That sounds great until you realize they’ve spent months executing requests that felt urgent in the moment but weren’t actually moving anything forward. Part of having a senior partner is having someone who will tell you when your time & money are better spent elsewhere, and redirect you accordingly.
You get a realistic marketing strategy built for your brand, not a generic playbook.
A lot of agencies have a signature move: a templated PDF lead magnet funnel, a content calendar, a paid ads structure they run for every client, and the classic “Have you tried social media marketing?” It’s efficient for them, but it isn’t always right for your brand. Your marketing strategy gets built around your business specifically, not borrowed from the last client who seemed similar enough, or generated by whatever AI tool is trending this week.
What’s Included in Marketing Essentials
Quarterly Marketing Roadmap
Every 90 days you get a clear picture of where your marketing is headed and exactly what it's going to take to get there. We build around real performance data from the previous quarter so the plan always reflects where your brand actually stands.
Multi-Channel Strategic Guidance
Ongoing senior oversight across your email, paid ads, SEO, and social media so every channel is working together towards your goals. Nothing gets optimized in isolation while something else falls by the wayside & stagnates your progress.
Monthly Social Content Calendar
Take the guesswork out of social media posting with a monthly plan built around your actual promotional schedule, key dates, content pillars, and brand goals so your content has a reason behind it and your team always knows what's coming next.
Strategic Copy & Asset Review
Before your content goes out to your audience, we review it for strategic alignment, conversion optimization, and whether it's going to land the way you intended. You get clear feedback & direction, and a lot less second-guessing before you publish.
Monthly Performance Report
You get a monthly plain language summary of how your marketing is performing, what it means for your business, and three to five prioritized actions for the month ahead so you always know where to focus your efforts, even on limited time.
Monthly Strategy Review Meeting
Each month we come to you with real data and a clear point of view on where your marketing stands. This is where we adjust for what's actually happening in your business so the plan stays realistic without losing momentum.
The Cost of Figuring It Out As You Go
The cost of not having marketing direction rarely shows up as one big obvious loss. It shows up slowly, in time spent on the wrong things & effort that never quite compounds into anything. Hard work without the right direction is just expensive trial and error, and every month without a clear strategy is a month that might not be going anywhere.
A strategic marketing consultant who knows your business and your goals changes that. Not because they do the work for you, but because they make sure the work you’re doing is actually worth doing.
Marketing Essentials starts at $1,500 a month. Less than the cost of an in-house employee, with a lot more expertise behind it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you want to know about Marketing Essentials before you reach out.
Marketing takes time to compound, and we’ll be upfront with you about that from day one. A lot of agencies say yes & promise quick results so they get your business, but if you’re desperate for immediate sales just to keep the lights on then we’re not the right fit (at least right now). We find it’s best to start with the foundations, building something that scales instead of implementing bandaid fixes that don’t last. What you’ll notice first is that your marketing starts to feel more intentional and less scattered. From there we’ll track each activity to scale what’s working, peeling back what isn’t. Measurable results depend on where you’re starting from, what your goals are, and how consistently the strategy gets executed, but we’ll always be honest with you about what’s realistic at your stage.
Then we change it. Marketing is rarely a straight line and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. We monitor everything we put out, and when something isn’t performing the way it should we adjust, test something different, and keep going. You’ll always know what’s working, what isn’t, and what we’re doing about it.
Not at all, and most of our clients didn’t either. Our first step is always auditing where you’re at right now, so that we can identify where your biggest gaps are. Once we find those gaps, whether they’re within your marketing infrastructure, your audience alignment, your messaging approach, or your tactical execution, we build a realistic plan around them that you understand & can confidently execute on.
That’s a conversation we’re always open to having. If you get to a point where you need us doing more of the heavy lifting, we can talk about what a Growth Partnership or Fractional CMO engagement would look like for your business.
We do typically start with a 3 month contract so that we allow enough time to start seeing progress, but that said, we’re not trying to trap you. Locked in retainers don’t make sense for a small business. You know what you’re paying for every month and you’re not stuck with anything you’re not getting value from. If down the road you need to pause or adjust, we’re open to having that conversation. Even if you hit a point where you feel like you can naturally progress on your own, that’s ok too! We work with clients whose success genuinely matters to us, and we stand by that wholeheartedly no matter what it looks like.
That depends on your capacity, and figuring that out is part of what we do during onboarding. We scope your marketing strategy around what you and your team can realistically take on so you’re not handed a plan that requires more bandwidth than you actually have. Plus, we’ll prioritize everything for you so if time gets tight, you know what the most important activities to complete are. Outside of your monthly strategy call, the time commitment is truly different for everyone, but we’ll keep open communication about it.
Marketing Essentials is built for brand owners who can execute plans themselves, even if that means it’s just you. We build the strategy around what’s actually realistic for your capacity so you’re not left with a plan you can’t action.
Testimonials
Contact Us
Email: info@violetandvine.ca
Locations: Calgary, AB | Kelowna, BC
Business Hours: M- F 9 am – 4 pm
We’re based in Calgary and Kelowna and work with founder-led businesses across Canada, mostly remotely but we’ll show up in person when it matters. Every client works directly with us, not through an account manager or a junior team learning on your dime.