Dream Local Digital is an online marketing company and digital agency headquartered in Rockland, Maine, with clients and sales partners nationwide. We have grown to nearly 30 employees and managed thousands of campaigns for clients throughout North America. Our focus is in social media strategy, management, ad campaigns and execution. We also do content marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization and marketing, web sites, display campaigns, mobile geofencing and more. As a startup, we need to acquire new customers and new talent at as low of a cost as possible. We are interested both in customer acquisition and talent pipeline. - Customer acquisition: We are very good at brand awareness, and also have and SMB database to match customer need with our products. However, we aren't adding customers at a fast enough rate. If you have recommendations on tech, sales process tools or collateral, or campaigns we would benefit from it. Your team would also be working with mine that are managing campaigns nationwide for other companies, could be good collaboration. We have both direct sales and reseller partner sales channels, the project could focus on both and/or either one channel. The direct channel is a straightforward one and could focus on sales efficiency, approach to market, and presentations. The reseller channel would likely touch upon training, tools, motivation and focus of the reseller salesforce and leadership. It could also identify new sources of potential resellers and develop a campaign to acquire those, which would be very fruitful for us. - Talent Pipeline: This is an area of significant need for us, as our business is built on the productivity and creativity of our talent. Many of our employees range from early twenties - mid thirties, and the majority of them are in Maine (in more than 9 different areas of the state). However, you can live anywhere and work for us (everything is cloud based), provided you can be a self-starter and hit deadlines. Many of our more junior employees struggle to work from home due to lack of focus, self-discipline, etc. As a result, many of our employees come to the office in Rockland each day. However, to scale up, we need to attract talent nationwide. We can create clusters and get office space in other communities (three past attempts at this weren't successful and we can discuss why), and/or have work from home employees. This means I need TALENT, creativity and DRIVE when a manager / supervisor isn't there to monitor. And, I need that in a largely millennial workforce. We co uld revi ew our job descriptions, titles, advertising / promotion of jobs, tactics of where we post them, as well as how to motivate and train our workforce on an ongoing basis. Your team would interact with a multi-disciplinary team on my side including People Ops, training, marketing, and hiring managers as well as myself. We also have an internship program that more than 75 people have gone through that we would like your feedback on. Finally, I'd like to look at retaining talent, by nature of the life-stage in their career, many of our millennial workforce leaves after a couple of years, which causes more problems in training, onboarding and cost of replacements.

Customer Acquisition: I'd love to have feedback on an efficient process/campaigns/sales collateral to help us acquire more customers. If we received a plan to increase direct sales and/or lead acquisition in direct by even 20% that would be meaningful. If we received a plan that increased the productivity of our existing reseller channels by 10% that would grow exponentially as we are adding in more resellers in those groups each month. Or, if we identified a plan to gain a new type / category of reseller efficiently that would produce solid sales, that could be a huge win for our business. - Talent Pipeline: A cost-effective and efficient plan to identify and source new talent while retaining talent longer would be a game changer for our business. Because we are small, we don't have deep People Ops resources, and while we are good marketers, that doesn't always translate to getting the right talent. We're in a rapidly growing and popular field, and believe that with the right plan we could be of interest to a lot of applicants for both our internship program, our freelancer network, and our employee positions. This would be very valuable to us and position us for scale in 2017 and beyond.

Add Skills: An understanding of online marketing, search engines, social media and how they are leveraged to promote businesses, products, and encourage purchases. - Customer Acquisition: For this project - an understanding of sophisticated marketing techniques, minimizing cost/acquisition and gaining efficiencies, and sales process, sales techniques and sales generally will be important. - Talent Pipeline: An understanding of how to attract candidates both through messaging and promotion of open positions in internships, freelance projects and employee based situations. Ideas on how to motivate and drive employees while working virtually using the tool suites we have. And finally, ideas and tactics to leverage for retention would be important.

We are a Maine-based company with more than 80% of our revenue from out of state, and more 90% of our employees are in Maine. We are also attracting people to move back to Maine, and are committed to job creation in Maine. We are also committed to creating high quality and challenging positions for people who want to learn more about online marketing, making them marketable in a way that schooling can't provide. Many of our interns and freelancers move to positions with us, and many of our employees move on to larger agencies or companies. We are in an emerging and fast-moving field, which makes us attractive as a project because it will be interesting, challenging and skills-building for your student consultants. Our team has deep experience in this space as well as consulting, and will make strong collaborators on a project. And finally, as a lean start up, we need to make the most of everything we spend in both time and money, and either of these projects if successfully completed would make a huge difference for our company. We are marketers and would promote the project and it's success, and make good testimonials for the program.

To learn more about us, visit dreamlocal.com To learn more about me, visit https://dreamlocal.com/dt_team/shannon-kinney/ linkedin.com/in/shannonkinney I was a graduate of UMaine Orono, and we currently have a Senior Marketing Strategist that lives in Cumberland Hall, his wife is a RA there.

A group of 4 student-consultants, in their final year of their business degree, will work for 3 months on your strategic problem / opportunity! At the end of which they will submit a strategic plan that is accompanied by a 15-minute presentation.