5&Vine is your Toronto Marketing Agency.

A brand strategy is your long-term plan to build a brand that wins and retains loyal customers that seek your products and services and beyond advocates. A successful brand strategy encompasses a strong “why” or your reason for being, your brand’s mission and values, your promise to the customer, and how you consistently communicate this across all customer touchpoints to win trust.

A marketing strategy is your company’s roadmap for accelerating growth and winning prized market share from competitors by understanding what your customers need and the competitive advantage you have to win their business. It includes a detailed analysis of the competitive landscape, your target customers, the products/services you offer, as well as the messaging you’ll use to connect with customers across specific sales channels, both online and offline.

For any company, from startup to enterprise, hiring and supporting an in-house marketing team can be daunting. It requires recruiting, mentorship, salary negotiation, benefits, and more. Alternatively, partnering with a marketing agency provides a helpful solution for founders and CEOs. A marketing agency will help you build out your go-to-market strategy, bringing a wealth of insight to resonate with your target audience – without the extra responsibilities that come with building a fully in-house team.

Thousands of new brands launch each year, yet only a small fraction of them are able to challenge incumbents and win significant market share. A common denominator between the winners is that they prioritized strategic marketing leadership from the start. Key benefits of hiring a marketing agency include: a fresh perspective on your business, specialized support for your in-house team, and a track record of KPI-backed success. 

 

A fresh perspective on your business: A marketing agency will understand your industry, category, business model, offering, target market, and more. With this understanding, and years of experience developing go-to-market strategies, they will be able to identify key barriers to growth, as well as support your team in developing a strategy to overcome them.

 

Specialized support for your in-house team: In-house marketing teams can be at maximum capacity and in need of additional marketing expertise to keep moving at the necessary pace to win. Hiring more in-house team members can be exceptionally time-consuming and, even when they are in place, they need time to build chemistry. A strong marketing agency is adept at building trusted relationships with in-house teams fast, so you have more support dividing and conquering. Whether you already have a marketing team or not, a skilled marketing agency will work around existing infrastructure without friction or imbalance.

 

A track record of KPI-backed success: Past success is a strong indicator of future success. The marketing agency that you choose should have a history of winning in two areas: first, in the industry in which you operate, like fintech, healthtech, or e-commerce. Second, a breadth of experience across industries, enabling them to bring the best of other worlds to yours to be truly innovative. When researching any marketing agency to partner with, you should be able to read multiple case studies with metric-backed results proving that they make a difference.

Here are 5 common signs that you need to hire a marketing agency:

1. The in-house marketing team is inexperienced or overwhelmed – or both: Marketing is vast and there’s often a multitude of responsibilities that teams must prioritize. Inexperienced teams may not best best at defining the most efficient strategy to lead the team – or in some instances, the strategy is sound though the team needs more support in planning and making it real.
2. The team lacks a seasoned marketing leader: Startups often get by with a junior growth lead and marketing team, and could benefit from executive level guidance to help them get to the next level.
3. Leadership keeps running into the same barriers: When problems feel cyclical, like lack of sales or pitch meetings despite a promising product, it’s time to get fresh perspective from an outside source. Marketing agencies are able to bring knowledge from a variety of hands-on experiences to help you reframe the issues you keep running into, and find new paths forward.
4. Building the product/service is the core in-house team focus: Companies sometimes focus so heavily on building a product or service that they haven’t yet hired a marketing team. In these instances, they need interim leadership and a marketing team while they staff up.
5. The team is looking to accelerate growth and exit: A venture capital firm would like to accelerate growth in one of their portfolio companies to prepare for sale.

How is 5&Vine’s approach different from other creative agencies? At 5&Vine, we stand apart from traditional marketing agencies by embracing a Challenger Brand mindset. Our hardwired approach disrupts the norm, fueling growth rather than settling for incremental progress. Led by a Fractional CMO with decades of experience, our team of experts in growth, design, and copywriting is dedicated to understanding your desired change on all levels, enabling you to displace industry incumbents and make a meaningful impact. When you partner with 5&Vine, you not only gain access to our strategic prowess but also immerse yourself in a community of Challengers, united by a deep care for others and the wider implications of doing business.

At 5&Vine, we’ve been championing the cause of Challenger Brands, arming them with the tools and mindset to take on industry giants and reshape the landscape. Our experience speaks volumes – we’ve assisted countless brands in their fight for success, equipping them with the playbook needed to challenge the status quo.

Just like David facing Goliath, we understand the power of an unfair advantage, one that stems from courage, audacity, and a willingness to ask the tough questions. We run towards challenges, embracing them as opportunities to create real impact and drive change.

Take, for instance, our work with Haute Hijab. The Challenger engaged 5&Vine as their Fractional CMO and Marketing Agency to architect and strengthen their launch strategy, and support their capable in-house marketing team to elevate ideas, sequence the launch and mobilize their community.

Haute Hijab’s strong credentials in functional high fashion and civil rights advocacy by their founder Melanie Elturk were meaningful advantages that needed to be harnessed to take on industry incumbents Nike and Adidas.

We supported the launch of Can’t Ban Us, a campaign that helped shine a light on the prejudice that has held Muslim women back in sport, and highlights the determination that has enabled them to overcome. It features athletes like Noor Alexandria Abukaram, a cross-country runner disqualified for wearing a hijab, and Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, a woman banned from playing basketball in the WNBA for the same reason. It’s a campaign that speaks to those professional athletes but also the wider community of strong, determined Muslim women banned from wearing hijabs in sports or overlooked as a group who are not athletic.

As a result of our collaboration, Haute Hijab had their single largest day of sales, nearly 3x Black Friday 2020, alongside high profile press coverage in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Pop Sugar and Fashionista. In addition, the outpouring of support and stories of empowerment shared by their community on social media are paving the way for a generation of women to boldly and proudly engage in sport.

At 5&Vine, we go beyond the surface. We delve into the core of why our clients do business, celebrating the human beings behind their brands. By doing so, we position them to shape a radically better future – one where positive change thrives.

A digital marketing agency partners with socially conscious brands to develop strategies defining their value proposition, target audience, channels, and sales approach. Beyond tactics, they provide end-to-end solutions, including website design, branding, and analytics-driven optimization, to drive business growth.

In crafting a campaign strategy at 5&Vine, we align with your brand’s mission and social impact goals. This strategy begins with concept ideation that connects your campaign with your brand’s core mission. We meticulously define and target your audience, focusing on those who resonate with your purpose.

Our approach involves a thoughtful selection of campaign channels, encompassing both paid and organic options. We place great emphasis on content creation, ensuring that every piece embodies your brand’s core values and resonates with your audience. Budget planning is a strategic exercise, enabling the optimal allocation of resources.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and a robust reporting structure are established to track progress. Additionally, we often launch campaigns in test areas, allowing us to gather crucial insights before expanding into new markets, ensuring a well-informed and impactful approach. Our holistic strategy is designed not only to provide a return on investment (ROI) but also to maximize your brand’s return on impact (ROImpact), making a meaningful difference in your mission-driven journey.

We work with clients of various stages from startups to Fortune 500 in the following industries: Fashion, Fintech, Food & Beverage, Medtech, Proptech, Retail, SaaS, Smarthome, Subscription and Sustainability. Explore our work.

At 5&Vine, we like to take “2 dates” to ensure both sides are the right fit:

• 1st date: A 60 minute meeting at no cost to see if we have chemistry. We’ll discuss your business, our approach, and whether we have the potential to solve your challenges together.
• 2nd date: 2-5 days of paid work, depending on the size of your team and stage of business, to start putting that initial conversation to action.

If, after this process, the scope is agreeable, we engage. This approach ensures we play the most effective role for as long as it makes sense and is financially feasible to do so. So far, we have helped 2 clients attain exits, implemented user growth that’s generated over $1.6Bn in follow-on financing, led a number of successful rebrands, generated new revenue streams; and we’re just getting started.

Complete the Contact form and we’ll be in touch within 3-5 business days for complimentary 30-minute consultation on your brand’s next chapter.

A well-defined Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is your company’s North Star. It doesn’t just answer the “what” and “why” behind your product launch, but also delves into the “who” and “how” of reaching your target audience at scale. In essence, a robust go-to-market strategy is your compass, it gives you the clarity and direction you need to stand out from your competition, occupy market share, and eventually reach your profitability goals.

You can get started considering the best go-to-market strategy for your company with our free downloadable Go-To-Market worksheet.

Your Go-To-Market strategy is crucial to guiding your marketing team and company forward. It provides the clarity and direction necessary to stand out from your competition, occupy market share, and eventually reach your profitability goals. It will be one of your most often referenced company documents that will allow your brand to resonate with your Ideal Customers (ICPs) and Personas.