How Dakota Ridge Marketing built a custom client portal to drive efficiency & build brand thinking

Dakota Ridge Marketing uses Xtensio to create and organize all of its client collateral together in one shared, branded space.

A Case Study featuring Mark Howells and Dakota Ridge Marketing ...created with Xtensio.

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INDUSTRY & OVERVIEW

Marketing & Advertising

This case study examines how Boulder, CO Marketing & Advertising Agency Dakota Ridge Marketing uses Xtensio to build a custom client portal that drives efficiency and builds brand thinking. The team uses custom templates to define a repeatable strategic process for its core marketing programs. And shared Xtensio channels are utilized as personalized client dashboards where everyone can easily access important marketing collateral without spending hours searching for a specific document or version.

THE PROBLEM

Organizing a strategic marketing program

With 15 years of experience across all areas of marketing, from content to analytics and advertising to automation, Mark Howells focuses on helping companies enhance their marketing foundation. He launched Dakota Ridge Marketing in March of 2019, offering an 8-week strategic marketing program and 12-step marketing management services to help companies grow their revenue and increase profitability.

Needless to say, Mark and his team create a lot of content: strategic documentation, reports, market research, messaging guidelines, etc. The team needed a solution where they could easily create, organize and share client deliverables related to their core business services: The Marketing Foundation Program and Managed Marketing Services.

With Xtensio, Dakota Ridge Marketing is able to quickly and consistently build client reports, onboarding processes and strategies with custom templates and shared links. The team's branded Xtensio dashboard acts as a central portal where both their internal employees and the client can easily find and present key marketing and sales collateral, saving up to 4 hours a week searching for documents.

Mark Howells
Chief Strategist, Dakota Ridge Marketing

We were looking for a solution to bring structure and consistency to our internal processes, and make it easy for clients to access all of their marketing and strategies in one place. Xtensio solved both of these challenges wonderfully.

DEFINING A CUSTOM FRAMEWORK

Custom templates make it easy to scale the process

Dakota Ridge Marketing partners with global clients across industries from Mid-level SaaS to Digital Transformation firms to
B2B Mobile Apps. The agency works hand-in-hand with clients to provide every aspect of a cohesive marketing foundation, from understanding client goals and defining analytical processes to creating strategic deliverables and actionable outcomes.

Mark was looking for a solution where his team could build a repeatable process for creating documents related to their internal programs. Xtensio's custom templates brought efficiency to the agency's workflow by making it quick and easy to create branded, professional reports, strategic exercises, and marketing deliverables for each client.

Here's how the team built its strategic playbook with Xtensio:

Starting with Xtensio's templates and the blank slate, the drag-and-drop editor made it easy to create branded documents specific to each of Dakota Ridge's programs - agendas, onboarding processes, strategic marketing exercises, messaging guidelines, etc.
After creating documents for the first client, Mark saved custom templates that could be easily repurposed for different clients.
The agency now has a repeatable process to follow for each step of their marketing programs. This saves both the Dakota Ridge team and its clients' time and gets them towards their goal of increasing revenue faster. Plus, custom templates help build brand thinking and lock brand consistency.

Check out the Dakota Ridge custom persona template

The ability to easily drag and drop modules allow for branded client deliverables and initiatives to come together quickly.

Custom templates make it easy to consistently build professional-looking, branded documents, reports and presentations.

Mark Howells
Chief Strategist, Dakota Ridge Marketing

We use custom templates based around our internal programs which makes it easy to quickly build professional reports for clients.

DRIVING EFFICIENCY

Shared channel links act as a client portal for easy access to key marketing collateral

Benefit 1: The ability to keep everything organized internally and for each client with channels makes Xtensio an essential tool for the Dakota Ridge Marketing team. Mark creates a new channel on the team workspace for each client. As they work through the 8-week foundations program and the 12-step marketing management services, the team adds agendas, planning documents, marketing presentations and reports into each client's channel.

Benefit 2: The team shares the password-protected channel link with the client so they can easily access marketing collateral and strategies in one place. This enables Mark to share confidential data on a personalized client portal that looks branded and professional.

Benefit 3: The portal has links to the individual documents, reports and presentations tagged in the channel. Clients can quickly and easily access key deliverables from anywhere, saving up to 4 hours per week searching for documents. The live link gives the client access to the latest version of the document - no more searching through email attachments or different file versions. And clients can even present slideshows internally as needed.

Here are some of the different things Dakota Ridge Marketing creates and hosts on their Xtensio client portal:

Client Pitches & Proposals
Onboarding Processes & Timelines
Business Strategies
Messaging & Imagery Guidelines
Personas & Market Research

Check out these examples:

See Dakota Ridge's imagery guidelines document
See a client competitive landscape

Mark Howells
Chief Strategist, Dakota Ridge Marketing

Our internal team and our clients save 3-5 hours per week not having to search for or recreate documents.

Shared channel links make it easy to give clients a single source of truth where all the marketing collateral and strategies they create are hosted and easily accessible from anywhere.

Dakota Ridge Marketing

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Dakota Ridge Marketing works hand-in-hand with clients across industries from Mid-level SaaS to Digital Transformation firms to B2B Mobile Apps through an 8-week program to enhance the business's marketing foundation and develop sound strategies. Then via the 12-step managed marketing process, the agency implements those strategies for goal achievement to enhance business growth.

Mark Howells

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Mark has 15 years of experience across all areas of marketing, from content to analytics to advertising to automation. He is able to handle both the details of a campaign strategy and how that campaign fits into the bigger picture. As part of Dakota Ridge Marketing, Mark brings his skill set to companies across the globe, helping them build out their cohesive marketing foundations and implement strong strategies, resulting in achieved revenue and profitability goals.

Boulder, CO

This case study was created using Xtensio.

Xtensio is a strategy and communications platform where teams create, collaborate, share and present with ease. Over 200,000 entrepreneurs, consultants, agencies, and educators use Xtensio to build smarter living documents.

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