The Well Known Onboarding Process:

From First Conversation to Full Partnership

At Well Known Marketing and Advertising, we know that hiring an agency is more than just outsourcing tasks — it’s about building a strategic partnership that will fuel your business’s growth. Our onboarding process is designed to take you from your first conversation with us to a point where your marketing runs smoothly, strategically, and with measurable results.

Here’s how we get there:

Step 1: The Initial Connection

It starts when a business owner reaches out — often because they’re facing a key challenge:

  • Struggling to grow their brand’s awareness

  • Feeling the squeeze from competition

  • Wanting to acquire more of the market share

  • Needing a stronger market presence and brand awareness

  • Ready to scale but lacking an in-house marketing team

  • Losing money and not seeing results due to advertising incorrectly

  • Overwhelmed with today’s landscape of digital media platforms

In many cases, they recognize that to achieve their goals, they’d need the equivalent of an entire marketing department — a team of 4–6 specialized professionals. Instead of piecing that together internally, they come to us.

Our first meeting is a high-level, open conversation about your needs, challenges, and big-picture objectives. You also learn how Well Known works — what our client-agency relationships look like, how we collaborate, and what we can deliver.

Step 2: The Discovery Meeting

If we both see potential alignment, you’re invited to a Discovery Meeting.

This step includes:

  • Signing an NDA to ensure confidentiality

  • Completing a Discovery Questionnaire to help us prepare

  • A 90-minute deep-dive session where we explore your business in detail:

    • Growth objectives

    • Market positioning

    • Competitive landscape

    • Ideas for new products, services, or verticals

The purpose: to understand your business thoroughly so we can craft a tailored proposal that identifies how Well Known is able to solve your challenges, support your team, and boost profitability.

Step 3: Proposal & Agreement

Following Discovery, our team develops a custom proposal outlining:

  • Recommended strategies and initiatives

  • Solutions for addressing pain points

  • A detailed outline of our deliverables from strategic planning to design, to management to execution, we get granular

  • A quote for our services and payment schedule

  • A note of what is not included in the contract

You’ll have time to review, then we'll meet again to walk through it together. If all is agreed upon, we sign a Client–Agency Agreement — designed to protect and benefit both parties.

Step 4: Onboarding (4–6 Weeks

Once the agreement is signed, we move into onboarding.

This phase is critical for setting a strong foundation:

Housekeeping: Account access or establishment, asset gathering, and permissions

Communication protocols: Establishing points of contact, update cadences, and reporting methods

Team integration: Introducing our agency to your staff to build alignment and buy-in

Market research & analysis: SWOT assessments, competitive audits, ad spend projections, and tracking setup

Channel audits: Social media, email, website, and other marketing touchpoints

During this time, our creative team begins developing your brand brief, visual assets, and messaging framework.

Step 5: Strategic Planning

Shortly after onboarding begins, we hold a Strategic Planning Meeting.

Our Strategic Director and Senior Account Director present a Year-at-a-Glance Marketing Plan — a high-level roadmap that evolves as we learn more about your business and market conditions.

This plan covers:

  • Strategic Plans to fulfill business objectives by way of marketing

  • Campaign themes and timelines

  • Proposed content and creative direction

  • Channel strategies (social, digital, traditional)

  • KPI benchmarks and measurement methods

Step 6: Creative Rollout

With strategy approved, the creative work begins in earnest:

  • A brand brief is developed

  • Branding assets, if required

  • Graphic design

  • Commercial photography and videography, if required

  • Copywriting and brand storytelling

  • Website and email campaign development

  • Social media content planning

  • META and Google ad development

  • Print and digital asset development

Your Brand Brief becomes the guiding document for all future creative, ensuring every touchpoint aligns with your vision and objectives.

Step 7: Day-to-Day Marketing Management

Once campaigns launch, our role shifts into full management mode.

This is when you begin to feel the impact of working with Well Known:

  • Ongoing social media management

  • Email marketing and automation

  • Website updates and optimization

  • Campaign performance tracking and reporting

  • Continuous creative updates

Step 8: Ongoing Evaluation & Strategic Meetings

Every month, we hold high-level strategic meetings to review results, uncover insights, and adjust our approach. We measure what’s working, refine what’s not, and keep your marketing aligned with evolving goals.

By this point, the partnership feels seamless — your business benefits from having a full marketing department working behind the scenes, driving results while you focus on running your company.

At Well Known, onboarding isn’t just paperwork and introductions. It’s a carefully crafted process that transforms initial conversations into long-term, results-driven relationships — the kind that help your brand become not just known, but well known.