Welcome to our new brand! 

Growth Panel is software-as-a-service (SaaS) that blends a career’s worth of marketing content with online project management. It’s a marketing platform that enables users to generate marketing solutions, add their own expertise to make it their own, and organize and manage their marketing activities.

How do we describe our space? We’re calling it Intelligent Marketing Management. Growth Panel delivers a ton of marketing content focused on marketing planning, execution, and results–all blended into an online project management application. 

We didn’t seem to fit into any of the existing slots: We’re not MRM, EMM, MOM, marketing analytics, planning, marketing automation or plain old project management. (Aren’t those acronyms terrible?) 

Since our application is completely new and different, we wanted our brand to capture the essence of what we deliver for companies and marketing consultants.

It’s a control panel for company growth. Thus, Growth Panel was born. 

The Journey 

It’s been a long journey getting to this point. We started as a group of domain experts–sales, marketing and SME executives–creating marketing structure for our SME clients (small to mid-size entities, typically under $100 MM in revenue). We quickly realized the value of our internal content and tools and transitioned them to the web for others to access. 

We added software expertise to our team, worked with our customers, and put together everything we learned to complete the transition.  Now we’re a unique SaaS offering that addresses a major pain point for most SMEs. 

Marketing Consultants

Marketers and consultants have previously used our marketing content and tools to develop marketing strategies and plans, execute tasks and grow their expertise, whether it’s for their own company or their consulting practice clients. 

Since we allow our users to put their own brand on our content and tools, consultants use it as infrastructure for their practice, whether they’re facilitating strategy, expanding tactical marketing offerings, or handling marketing planning for client companies. 

There aren’t many offerings in the marketplace that give consultants such generous rights. 

Marketing Departments

For SMEs, the value and return can be just as great. Marketing is challenging and often misunderstood. Most SMEs don’t have the bandwidth or resources to select the right marketing activities or effectively execute for successful results.  SME marketers generally have expertise in only a handful of areas, which often limits their selection of strategies and tactics. 

With Growth Panel, SMEs can access a complete array of marketing intelligence to choose the right marketing strategy and tactics, with tools their team can use for better execution. There’s nothing similar at a comparable cost. The alternatives include countless years of study and expensive training, increased headcount, or both. 

Check out our tour! We’re looking forward to continuing to help marketing teams and consultants add intelligence to their marketing management to achieve better business results!

As many of you know, we’ve almost completed our new application. 

Instead of simply adding new functionality onto our existing app and improving key features, we decided to build a completely new app from the ground up. One reason was technological–we needed to unify the backend components of our existing site.

But the main reason was that we wanted to take some of our high-value functionality (our plan creator) and integrate it into the way our users work. Instead of “adding on,” we went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. 

The upside of this approach was our ability to reference all of the customer intelligence we’ve gained over the last 2 years and apply it during our build. We had a blank canvas. Instead of making minor improvements and adding bits and pieces, we rebuilt the high-value functionality into a new app and eliminated the low value features.

The downside was that it was time-consuming and challenging.

Internally we called it our “v3.0,” but during initial customer testing, we realized we had a “problem”–our new application had outgrown our existing brand.  In our existing v2.0, most of the value we deliver is from our content. We serve it up from our site and have some nice software widgets for managing goals and campaign metrics. 

But our v3.0 is a full blown web-app, meshing online project management, document management and collaboration into our existing marketing process and content. 

Since we have a completely different offering, we need a new brand. It was crystal clear after one of our distributors said “Jim, this is a completely different offering. It’s much more than the M.O. brand.” 

So instead of simply birthing our new app, we’re birthing an entire new product offering.  As much as I didn’t want to undertake this additional workload, it’s the right thing to do, and the right time to rename and rebrand. 

The new app is just about done, so we’re moving on to the rest of the list: 

• New name
• New logo
• New corporate identity
• New positioning
• New brand strategy
• New messaging
• New website
• New sales tools & literature
• New campaigns

The long project just got longer, but with this much effort already expended, it makes sense to get it right…

To execute a marketing campaign, you have to juggle many moving parts: lists, creative, media buys, proofs, fulfillment and tracking. 

It’s time consuming to organize multiple vendors and resources, and one missed deadline can throw your whole campaign off schedule. Software can help automate certain campaigns, but most web-applications for small-to-midsize companies don’t handle end-to-end campaign planning, fulfillment and execution (except for email marketing platforms).

Currently available marketing apps are typically extensions of CRM platforms and/or cover a specific niche like 

• Lead management
• Campaign analytics
• Email marketing
• Web marketing and SEO 

What I’ve been wondering is “why isn’t there a website for a marketer, or better yet, a non-marketer, to create and launch any number of different types of campaigns ‘soup-to-nuts,’ without leaving the browser?” 

In preparation for our upcoming Consulting M.O. v3.0 launch, I’ve been reviewing web-based marketing execution applications. Why? While our tools help consultants plan marketing execution, we haven’t taken the extra step to deliver the actual tools to execute their plans.  It makes sense to add them to complement the robust planning functionality in our new version.  

There are some great apps out there, and I was fortunate enough to find one that’s different from the others. The folks at Ad Giants are creating it. Though their new app is still under wraps, our excitement isn’t:  

We’re excited to announce our partnership to bring together our detailed marketing planning tools with their powerful marketing execution apps.

What we can discuss

The partnership lays the foundation to bring together our Consulting M.O. platform of web-based marketing planning tools with Ad Giants’ marketing execution tools including The ONE System^TM for marketing brand management and PitchRocket^TM, a web-based lead generation and sales-messaging engine.

Dynamic messaging, personalization and direct results

While The ONE System is geared for bigger corporate clients and franchises, some of our consultants work with these types of clients and can earn commissions for referrals. And better yet, our licensees can gain special preview access to their new app, and discount pricing to their current PitchRocket application.

From PitchRocket, users can design custom, personalized direct mail and email campaigns, using variable printing and personalized website pages to deliver custom, sticky messages that are easy to track. Since PitchRocket provides list management, creative templates, web-sitelets and fulfillment services, users can design and launch a complete campaign from their browser, eliminating the need to hire and manage subcontractors. 

Think of it as 

• Using one-to-one printing in your direct mail piece;
• Integrating website pages with personalized URLs to extend your message;
• Adding email to the campaign; and
• Tracking the direct mail with almost the same precision as email tracking. 

Naturally, this combination delivers much higher response rates than an old school direct mail campaign. How much greater? It depends, but what Donovan Dillon, Ad Giants’ President, told me was impressive: “Jim, we don’t approve a template until we’ve tested it enough to achieve an 18% response rate.” 

Of course, actual results will also be impacted by list quality and offer relevance, but nevertheless, I was sold. 

What’s coming? 

As we both put the finishing touches on our new applications, we’ll share more information.  Our goal? Combine forces to deliver a one stop shop for marketing planning and marketing execution tools delivered via the web.

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