Commercial

Onboarding, day by day

Marketing agency onboarding is usually a questionnaire, a kickoff call and then three weeks of silence. This is the actual checklist: what happens on which day, what we need from you, and what moves the date when it is late.

Before anything is signed

• A written scope. Every page, every deliverable, the price and the term, in a document you keep.
• Which bucket the engagement is in, in writing. One SEO client per industry, per city. Ads and websites are not exclusive, and we say so.
• The term, stated once and not renegotiated later. 90 day initial term, then month to month at the same price. The industry asks for 6 to 12 months.
• Where the custom website is included, the one condition that travels with it. Stay past month 2 and the included website is yours outright. Cancel before that and it is invoiced at $2,500, instead of the remaining months.

Days one to five

• Day one: one call, recorded with your permission, where we get the business rather than the brief. Margins, the jobs you actually want, and the ones you keep taking only because the phone rang.
• Day one: access requests go out. Delegated access only, never a password, granted from your side at the level the work needs.
• Day two: we read whatever numbers already exist before touching anything. Search Console, analytics, the ad account, the lead records. A baseline you cannot reconstruct later is a baseline you have lost.
• Day three: the keyword and question map. What your buyers search, what they ask a model, and which of those you can realistically win in this city.
• Day five: the build brief, back to you in writing. Sitemap, page by page, with the one question each page exists to answer.

Days six to fifteen

• Design and build on the agreed sitemap, with no page builder and no theme underneath it.
• Content written against the brief using your facts, your prices and your service area. No placeholder copy ships, at any stage.
• The technical layer: schema, internal links, metadata, and redirects from every old URL worth keeping.
• Measurement configured before launch rather than after. Analytics, conversion events, and call and form routing into the Ninetyfifth Marketing App so a lead cannot land nowhere.
• One review round with you, on a staging URL, with a deadline on it and your comments consolidated into one message.
• A rebuild changes nothing about what you keep. You keep the domain. We rebuild the site, it is inside the $2,500 rather than on top of it, and you own the code.

Launch week, and the first report

The site goes live inside the window written in your scope. Redirects go in the same day, not the following week. We watch the logs and the index for the first seven days, because the week after a launch is when a build either gets crawled properly or quietly does not, and that is a cheap problem on day three and an expensive one on day sixty.

Your first report lands on a fixed monthly date. It covers what shipped, what the numbers did, and what we need from you next. It arrives on that date even in the month where almost nothing moved, because that month is information too.

What we need from you

Short list, and it is the whole list. Onboarding stalls on these items and essentially nothing else.

• One decision maker. Not a committee, and not a forwarded email chain with three opinions in it.
• Delegated access to the accounts you already own, granted from your side.
• Photographs of your actual work, your actual premises and your actual team. If those do not exist, a content day produces them.
• Answers to roughly a dozen questions only you can answer. Pricing, service area, the work you refuse, and who you lose to.
• A review turnaround. One round, inside three business days, in one consolidated message.

What we do not ask you to do

• Write the copy. If you wanted to write it you would not be hiring anyone.
• Sit in a weekly status call. You get a monthly report and an inbox that answers inside a day.
• Hand over a password. Not at onboarding, not ever.
• Approve a mood board, a persona deck or a brand workshop. At this size none of those sell anything.

When onboarding goes badly

The usual failure is neither side. It is the middle: access that never arrives, photographs that never arrive, a review round that sits unopened for three weeks. The build date moves and nobody mentions it until launch week.

So we mention it. When something we need is late, you get the new date the day we know it with the blocker named, and the term does not start running on a build we cannot start. Ninety days is only a fair test of the work if the first thirty were not spent waiting.