Sparks and Recs

What We Do

Sparks & Recs is focused on helping startups and other companies with limited marketing resources. We believe every company, regardless of budget, deserves an effective and efficient marketing engine from both a technical and creative standpoint.

We start off with a discovery process to understand the unique situation and state of your business and marketing.

In order to create a custom tailored package that will suit your needs, we’ll go through this process with you:

Step one

Discovery call

We’ll talk to learn where things are with your marketing and where you want to go.

Step Two

Deep dive audit

We’ll examine any existing marketing assets and platforms to understand what we’re working with.

Step Three

Strategic roadmap

We’ll present a plan tailored to your needs, and a realistic timeline to follow and implement.

The roadmap will include recommendations on what we can help with, what you might want to do internally, and more. We’ll figure out which of our offerings are relevant and useful to your business.

Our Offerings

Marketing Strategy

Strategic recommendations to implement and optimize organic and paid campaigns on Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn and other platforms. The best ad tracking, analytics and CRM integrations and configurations for your needs. Even if you aren’t ready to run marketing campaigns, we’ll work together to get your foundation ready so you’re ready to go when the time is right. We’ll especially focus on efficient and wise use of any marketing spend, given how critical this can be at the early stages.

Creative and Messaging

Keeping your messaging and creative fresh is vital to successful growth. We’ll talk with you, your employees and if you like, your customers, to understand all perspectives on your products and services and your customer’s pain points. We’ll also work with you to narrow down your target customers. We’ll provide ad copy, creative ideas and landing page tweaks and run workshops with your team to keep things fresh on an ongoing basis.

Management

We can provide hands on campaign build outs, budgets, optimizations and updates, and also support your existing team as needed. We can also help with analytics and integrations, especially at the early stages to make sure everything is being tracked and ready for future growth.

Reporting and analytics

Understanding what’s working and what isn’t is vital, and that requires reports and dashboards that are clear, accurate and actually readable/actionable. We’ll focus in on the reporting that is actually relevant to your business.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

One of the keys to successful marketing is proper alignment with sales. This is one of our key focuses, and we’ll work with your teams to ensure the right goals, reporting and communication to make sure both teams are working well together.

Pricing

What does it cost? Every business is different, so we don’t offer fixed packages. We’ll work with you to figure out what best suits your business and budget and current needs and goals. We’re especially sensitive to the budget constraints that startups often work under, and we try to make sure you’ll still get the best foundation for affordable and efficient growth possible. We believe every business deserves and needs a good marketing engine even if they don’t have a large budget to work with.

Testimonials

“I had the privilege of partnering with Justin on high-growth Paid Marketing (him) and SEO strategies (me) for one of the fastest-growing tech companies in America, which recently sold for $743M. Justin is a terrific partner. He's very data-driven and understands and considers paid search, social, programmatic, business software directories, and other channels, as well as marketing automation, content marketing, and product marketing, to deliver high-growth strategies. Equally important, Justin has character. His honesty and integrity match his work ethic. I would enjoy an opportunity to work with him again.”

Michael Benedict

Founder, Nobility Press and 1145 Digital Marketing

“Justin has many years of experience managing and optimizing paid advertising campaigns. During our time at a leading field services SaaS company, he managed 6-figures in monthly ad spend for us. We set ambitious lead volume and lead quality goals each quarter and Justin was able to consistently exceed them. His curiosity and drive for improvement were great assets for us and he was able to roll with the typical budget adjustments and flexibility that are often required when working at a VC-backed (and later PE-backed) business. Justin is also a great communicator (in person, phone, email/Slack, etc.) and I can't recommend him enough.”

Jason Peck

CFP(r), EverWise Wealth Management of Raymond James

“At AddThis, Justin was essential to our monetization team. He played a critical role in setting up the core technical framework and technologies, like ad serving and reporting, that we leveraged for our advertising operations. Moreover, not only did Justin deliver in terms of his contributions, but embodied our core values along the way. In particular, he always took a people-first approach to collaborations - demonstrating empathy and understanding. I would work with him again in a heartbeat.”

Hooman Radfar

Co-Founder + CEO, Collective
Co-Founder, AddThis

Who am I?

Illustration of Justin Higgins Hi, I’m Justin Higgins, and after two decades of being an in-house marketer and ad ops specialist, I started Sparks & Recs to bring what I’ve learned to a wider array of startups and small businesses. My background includes specializations in D2C and B2B marketing, ad tech and ad ops. My work has run the gamut from managing teams and agency relationships to hands on marketing, setting up and rebuilding ad campaigns and strategies in-house and for clients. I’ve worked with everything from shoestring budgets to 8-figure multi-channel international campaigns.

I founded Sparks & Recs because I believe every business should have a great marketing engine that contributes real growth and meaningful leads and customers. Many companies don’t have the budget or resources to work with large agencies or build out a large in-house marketing team. Sometimes there’s a “marketing team of one” who is being stretched too thin. This often leads to situations where there’s either no or minimal marketing foundation, or money and data is being left on the table. I’m here to help you make sure there’s a strong technical and creative foundation to build on and learn from, and to keep your messaging and creatives fresh.

The companies I want to help most are the ones that really want to get a good marketing engine off the ground, and those that are currently being hampered by not having everything in place that they should have. If this sounds like what you need help with, let’s talk and see how I can help.

Decades Experience

Million in ad budget managed

Average increase in Pipeline

Great marketing starts with a spark