GeoScienceWorld (GSW) is a non-profit collaborative and comprehensive resource for research and communications in the Earth Sciences. Working with societies, institutions, and researchers around the world, GSW provides a single source of access to 50 journals, over 2,200 eBooks, and over 4 million GeoRef records.
GSW reached out to Maverick to provide a 3-year Marketing Strategy and Roadmap to help them achieve growth targets in line with their strategic initiatives while using a more structured and measurable approach. The COVID-19 pandemic, growing awareness of climate change, and other external factors made the context for this seven-month project uniquely challenging.
The project objectives focused initially on research — identifying customer insights and feedback, marketplace and sectors, products and services, and competitive intelligence, to establish patterns of opinion and customer experience requirements for geoscience information resources. Maverick applied a 3-phased approach to this research:
- Desk Research to gain a better understanding of the major market segments.
- Design, execution, and analysis of an Online Survey to obtain quantitative and qualitative data from GSW’s main customer groups.
- In-depth, one-to-one telephone interviews, enabling bespoke questioning and building on feedback already received from the survey.
The outcomes of this research phase formed the basis of segmentation of GSW’s target market, leading to the development of user personas and the creation of messaging for each market segment. This fed into the 3-year marketing strategy, comprising marketing initiatives and tactics to drive the appropriate level of growth, based on the intelligence obtained from the previous phases.
The roadmap outlined a structured and measurable approach for each of the three years, ready to be implemented by the GSW Marketing team.
The group at Maverick understood where GeoScienceWorld wanted to go, especially our vision for consistent growth across the societies, institutions, and research sectors we serve. The three-year marketing strategy and accompanying roadmap from Maverick outlined actionable steps for achieving our plans while staying true to our mission. Phoebe McMellon, CEO