Hi. Need a wingman to help your business take flight?
Where do I even start with marketing my business?
How do I get my site to appear in AI searches?
What are the best AI tools for my business?
What is AEO?
How do I get found on Google?
Is my logo any good?
How much should I be spending on marketing?
Why do I get no response to my marketing emails?
What's the best way to grow my sales?
How do I improve my social media content?
Should I be increasing my prices?
How do I know if my website is working?
Should I have a marketing plan?
What do my customers really think about my business?
What is 'storytelling' and should I be using it in my business?
How do I launch a new service?
How do I improve my Google ranking?
What makes my business stand out from my competitors?
How do I know if my marketing is actually working?
What's the best social media platform for my business?
Should I be doing Google Ads?
Do Facebook ads work?
Where do I even start with marketing my business? How do I get my site to appear in AI searches? What are the best AI tools for my business? What is AEO? How do I get found on Google? Is my logo any good? How much should I be spending on marketing? Why do I get no response to my marketing emails? What's the best way to grow my sales? How do I improve my social media content? Should I be increasing my prices? How do I know if my website is working? Should I have a marketing plan? What do my customers really think about my business? What is 'storytelling' and should I be using it in my business? How do I launch a new service? How do I improve my Google ranking? What makes my business stand out from my competitors? How do I know if my marketing is actually working? What's the best social media platform for my business? Should I be doing Google Ads? Do Facebook ads work?
Peace of mind.
Your external marketing department.
An experienced sounding board.
A safe pair of hands.
Award winning results.
Helping you acquire and retain customers.
Insights, strategy, creative, execution.
The right solutions every time.
Business owners have one job.
If your business is NEW or GROWING:
Your one job is to MARKET your products / services.
You can have the best technology, the lowest costs, or the smartest people, but unless you tell the marketplace about your products/services, you will not attract customers and your business will not be financially sustainable.
If your business is THRIVING:
Your one job is to INNOVATE.
AI isn't coming. It's already here — and it's already changing how your customers find businesses like yours. The question isn't whether AI will affect your business. It's whether you'll get ahead of it or catch up later. We demystify AI for New Zealand small businesses: what it means for your marketing, your visibility, and your competitive edge — in plain English, without the overwhelm.
As we enter the Exponential Age, the ONE JOB RULE has never been truer.
Now is the time to market and innovate.
About.
The Marketing Wingman.
The Marketing Wingman is a New Zealand marketing consultancy with over 30 years of professional marketing experience. Founded by Kirsty, it exists to help small and growing New Zealand businesses understand their marketing options, make confident decisions, and get better results — without the jargon, the overwhelm, or the big-agency price tag.
Experience and expertise
The Marketing Wingman's expertise spans direct marketing agencies, in-house marketing roles, and client management on the production side of marketing. That experience includes working with well-known brands in both New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and has been recognised with two Supreme Marketing Association Awards in New Zealand and a marketing award in the UK. Kirsty has also been invited to judge the New Zealand Marketing Association Awards — a reflection of her standing in the industry.
Core areas of expertise include marketing strategy, brand and communications, content creation, SEO, AEO, AI tool integration, customer engagement, data-led insights, and the psychology behind consumer behaviour.
What makes us different — value to others
What sets The Marketing Wingman apart isn't just experience. It's a genuine commitment to making marketing accessible and useful for the people we work with. Every recommendation is made with the client's best interests at the centre — not the size of the invoice. We take the time to understand your business, your customers, and your goals before suggesting a single action.
We believe good marketing advice should leave you more capable, more confident, and more informed — whether we're working together long-term or you're taking the next steps on your own.
Our current focus
As AI continues to reshape how customers search, compare, and buy, The Marketing Wingman is helping New Zealand small businesses understand what this means for their visibility, their marketing, and their competitive position. We demystify AI in plain English — so business owners can make smart decisions, not anxious ones.
Services.
Understanding.
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A great brand should directly appeal to the target market's needs and motives. It sets expectations, creates desire and builds engagement, ultimately generating loyalty and trust.
A well thought-out brand architecture allows for introduction of new products, services and experiences under the same brand umbrella whilst maintaining the integrity of the brand.
A Brand Architecture Review involves reviewing the product portfolio, brand guidelines (where available), business purpose and vision and providing written recommendations on an ideal brand architecture and how to achieve it.
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A brand is a promise you make to customers. It shapes beliefs and expectations and tells them how you are different from other brands or choices.
An effective brand name improves recognition, creates trust, grows sales, engages employees and increases business equity.
An effective visual identity should be simple, unique, versatile, on-brand, relevant, memorable and timeless.
Our Brand and Visual Identity Review starts with understanding your target market and competitors. We provide an assessment of your brand name and visual identity and recommendations for any improvements.
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Communications need to be fit for purpose, single-minded and adhere to your brand guidelines.
A Communications Review looks at all external digital and paper-based marketing communications and provides recommendations on how to improve messaging, creative, frequency, placement (media) and measurement.
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Understanding what your customers’ motives are defines the market you are in and who your competitors are.
Our Competitive Review is run as a guided workshop, identifying what your customers and what their motives are. This is used to create a visual map identifying where you sit relative to your competitors, relative size and where you need to focus to strengthen or establish your point of difference.
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Understand which customers are your best, in accordance with your ideal customer profile. Develop, apply and maintain a relative customer value score. Identify which products generate the most profit.
This is a bespoke service with our solutions tailored to analytics needs.
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Prior to starting any personalised customer communications, data analytics or modelling, it is important to have a robust, clean, legally-compliant database.
This Database Review will identify all issues around data structures, maintenance and quality along with recommendations on improving efficiency and resourcing.
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A review of your website or social media will help you understand how each channel is currently performing in terms of engagement, user experience, technical search performance and alignment with business goals and branding.
Our Digital Review will provide you with a detail technical report (website only) and recommendations on creative and media planning (social media)
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Understanding what customers or prospects think is key across the business.
Depending on the information required, we can undertake or advise on methodology, research tools, response handling, reporting and analysis. This includes Google Reviews, Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Instore Testing, Trial Groups and Focus Groups.
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We start by understanding which market you are in by identifying your ideal customer motives. We then do a deep dive using, economic, demographic and industry statistics to size industries and regional populations and understand trends. This data can then be overlayed with pricing information to develop high-level estimates of potential sales volumes.
This scoping exercise can be extended to understand barriers to entry, as required.
This is a useful tool for product launches and new business start-ups.
Planning.
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Having an external coach provides that extra level of accountability along with problem solving and learning new tools.
Frequency and format are tailored to your business and can be one-on-one or for a team.
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Our workshop uses the Now - Where - How framework to identify the current issues in the business, a direction for the next 12 months, actions and responsibilities and an accountability programme.
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Working from your annual marketing strategies an annual communications plan identifies the key messages, use of promotional incentives and media for each target market segment.
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A Content Plan is prepared quarterly, for the next 90 days and details the exact messages and imagery for type of media and is designed to optimise the repurposing of content to provide consistency and better engagement. After each quarter, response and engagement is measured to inform the next 90 days.
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Lead generation is different for every business and depends on your sales channels, current market awareness and the profile of your ideal client. We look at all these factors and apply best practice to design a programme that delivers results.
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This workshop examines each of the 5Ps - promotions, product, place, people and pricing alongside the business objectives, to come up with key strategies and actions / projects for the next 12 months.
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Doing.
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Our designers prepare high quality artwork suitable for commercial printing and digital assets such as websites, Google Ads and mobile apps.
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Advising on, designing, printing and sourcing all your collateral, signage and promotional items
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Our copywriters provide articulate, on-brand and strategic wording for use in paper-based and digital communications. We use a variety of keyword planning tools to assist with search optimisation.
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Successful communications start with a single-minded creative concept. This concept is designed to get the maximum engagement with the communication or across multiple communication elements.
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We manage all your Google, Web and Social media advertising.
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Designing email campaigns, building dynamic templates, personalisation, AB testing, reporting.
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Experiential marketing involves tactile and often interactive media to drive behaviour. Outdoor media includes fixed, mobile and digital billboards
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Personalised marketing is one of the most effective and measurable forms of communication as you are able to target individuals with highly relevant offers or information using highly creative ideas and formats.
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We can help you with print, press, cinema and radio advertising from booking media packages through to design, talent recruitment, scripting, despatch and analysis.
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Writing and designing engaging posts from personal and business accounts including reporting on engagement.
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We provide an end-to-end service with user experience-led navigation and design, back-end building, e-commerce, portals, advising on and sourcing domain names, connecting social media profiles, adding chatbots and setting up Google Analytics and Google Business Profiles.
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Using the latest SEO tools to provide recommendations and implement changes.
How we work.
If flexibility is important to you, then you’ll love our partnership options.
Choose the level of support you need.
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Get the flexibility you need by tapping into additional resources for a set period of time.
We can ‘hold the fort’ for a week, a month or a year. It’s up to you.
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Even with the best plans, business can throw a curve ball. We are here if you need a sounding board, a quick turn around or to take time out.
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If you need additional expertise or a fresh set of eyes, send us a brief or give us a call .
We provide an estimate and project scope prior to starting work.
Upon approval we allocate resources and confirm milestones, deadlines and approval processes.
You can relax knowing that your project of campaign is in a safe pair of hands.
Choose how you want that support delivered.
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We work a bit from your premises and a bit from ours. This may include attending meetings on site and then working from our offices, or any combination that works for you.
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We work entirely from your premises while supplying our own technical resources and tools.
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We are based in our office and provide support using zoom, email and phone.
FAQs
What does The Marketing Wingman Do?The Marketing Wingman is a New Zealand marketing consultancy that provides small and growing businesses with strategic marketing support — from brand and communications reviews through to content creation, digital advertising, SEO, and website builds. Think of us as your external marketing department: experienced, flexible, and focused on getting you real results without the overhead of a full-time hire.
How do I get my business found on Google in New Zealand?Getting found on Google comes down to three things: a well-optimised Google Business Profile, a website with the right local keywords and clear content, and a steady stream of genuine customer reviews. For New Zealand small businesses, local SEO is often the highest-return, lowest-cost marketing activity available — and it's one of our specialties.
How do I know if my marketing is actually working?If you can't answer that question clearly, it's a sign your marketing lacks measurable objectives. Good marketing tracks where enquiries come from, monitors website traffic, and measures conversion at each stage of the customer journey. We help clients set up simple, practical measurement frameworks — because what gets measured, gets improved.
Who is The Marketing Wingman for?We work with New Zealand small business owners who know marketing matters but aren't sure where to start, don't have the time to do it well, or want a more strategic approach than sporadic social media posts. Whether your business is new, growing, or ready to innovate, we tailor our support to where you are right now
What is AEO and why does it matter for my business website?AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It's the practice of structuring your website content so that AI tools — like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and Perplexity — can find, understand, and cite your business when answering search queries. As more New Zealanders use AI to find local services, having AEO-friendly content is becoming just as important as traditional SEO.
What makes The Marketing Wingman different from other marketing agencies?With 30+ years of experience across direct marketing agencies, in-house roles, and client management — and a track record that includes two Supreme Marketing Association Awards — we bring senior-level marketing thinking to small business budgets. We're not about throwing up the odd social post and hoping for the best. We take the time to understand your business, your customers, and your goals before recommending a single action.
Where is The Marketing Wingman based?The Marketing Wingman is based in Northland, New Zealand, and works with clients across the country. We offer on-site, hybrid, and fully virtual support — so wherever you are in New Zealand, we can help.
How much should a small New Zealand business spend on marketing?A commonly used benchmark is 5–10% of annual revenue, but for many small businesses just getting started, the priority is spending wisely rather than spending a lot. A clear strategy, a strong Google Business Profile, and consistent, well-written content will often outperform a larger budget spent without direction.
Can I just get help with one specific marketing project?Absolutely. We work on a contract, retainer, or project basis — so you can engage us for a single campaign, a website review, a content plan, or ongoing strategic support. There's no lock-in, just the level of help you need, when you need it.
Every week we dedicate several hours
… to making sure you get the latest media announcements, industry break-throughs and cool business stuff all translated into ‘normal person’ speak.
You can find this on our socials and blog, or get it delivered straight to your inbox.
No sales patter - just the stuff that you’d expect from your wingman.

