Marketing Audit and Strategic Roadmap

Background

Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) embarked on a significant business transformation in its transition towards full open access (OA) publishing. To support this change, CSP sought consulting services to create a marketing and brand growth strategy. The scale of the change required a consultant with expertise in all aspects of modern marketing and experience, building alignment between Marketing and Editorial teams to support author submission and author experience use cases.

What We Did

Our journey began with a comprehensive analysis of the organization’s aspirations in contrast to its current state. This involved conducting in-depth interviews, evaluating the competitive landscape, and reviewing the current marketing strategy and approach, performance metrics, and infrastructure. Armed with this “as is” assessment, we developed actionable recommendations.

To ensure those took root and evolved effectively, we conducted a series of collaborative workshops that fostered agile decision-making and provided training. We augmented our recommendations with in-depth playbooks that provided marketing with implementation advice and best practices. A pivotal aspect of our engagement revolved around co-creating tangible work products that propelled the implementation of our recommendations, including prioritized roadmaps, refined job descriptions, cross-functional RACIs, and journal treatment menus to guide the marketing team’s transformation.

Outcome

The CEO and cross-functional leadership came together to walk through the prioritized multi-year marketing transformation roadmap and ratify the recommendations. This process provided a roadmap for future growth behind which everyone at the organization is rallying. The marketing team is more confident and focused on its priorities, and the co-creation and playbooks have been particularly useful in accelerating implementation. We have been asked to continue to help CSP on its marketing transformation journey through advisory services and developing a campaign planning model.