Marketing Consulting in Fort Collins, Colorado

Burchett & Co. is a marketing consultancy in Fort Collins. We build market and marketing intelligence with proprietary analytical tools, rooted in large empirical datasets and rigorous statistical modeling. We use those tools, our experience, and network of specialists to help companies that have great products earn the customers they deserve. We help companies whose capabilities exceed their visibility answer the question: where are the customers you should be winning going instead, and why? We're great at helping companies see their market the way algorithms see it, which is important because algorithms are quickly becoming the gatekeepers of brand introductions.

The way people choose where to buy is changing faster than many companies realize

A customer used to open Google and type something close to what you sell and then click on a few blue links until they found something they liked. Many now open an assistant and describe the problem instead: my furnace keeps shutting off, or my neighbor's tree is leaning over the garage. The assistant answers with a paragraph and the names of a few companies. And even when they do go to Google, most of the time they're presented with an AI-generated answer.If your company is not one of the ones that shows up (or even can show up) in an AI query or zero-click result in search, there is nothing for you to measure. There is no impression to count and no click to attribute. Somebody got a useful answer and called a business that was in it, and no record of the sale you lost ever reaches you. A list of search results has a tenth position, but an answer does not.Bain & Company put numbers on this in February 2025. About 80 percent of consumers now rely on AI-written summaries for at least 40 percent of their searches, roughly 60 percent of searches end without a visit to any website, and Bain estimates the shift has already cut organic web traffic by 15 to 25 percent. That research is a year and a half old, and every line in it has kept moving in the same direction. That traffic is not coming back. Companies that adapt to this shift early are building a reasonably durable structural advantage, and in many cases, those companies that don't are going to get left in the dust, beaten by upstarts who don't really deserve the business, but who understand the game better.

We helped a local music studio break into the Fort Collins market in under a week

The studio's operator had run a studio on the other side of the country for ten years, and the credibility built over that decade did not make the move. Locally the studio was starting from nothing, in a market that already includes a studio with an international reputation.We started with the studio itself, helping crystallize what it does best and for whom. Then we used our tools to learn what people in Northern Colorado actually type and ask when they want that kind of work done, and which businesses the algorithms already recommend for each of those questions. Where the studio's strengths lined up with gaps in that field, we planned material to claim the ground, and before any of it was written we decided how the business should be described when somebody asked an AI system about it. Then we built and deployed the presence.Within a week the studio was the first result for audio mixing in Fort Collins and the second for mastering, ahead of businesses that have operated here for years. AI answers now include it and describe it accurately, down to the monitors in the control room and the fact that its pricing is published. Inbound inquiries went up immediately.Search results vary by location and by searcher. These were captured in Fort Collins in late July 2026.

We helped a national snack brand spot two fast-growing competitors it had never heard of

The brand sells more than half a billion dollars a year of snacks, sits fifth in its category, and advertises on national television. Our assessment identified two online companies, neither doing even two percent of the brand's revenue, holding the top positions for the category's biggest search term at half a million queries a month. The brand appeared nowhere on that page, and until the assessment, neither challenger was on its radar. As the brand we were helping was spending hard on national TV, it was unwittingly driving category demand into the open arms of two small businesses that were all too happy to gobble it up.In the same engagement, we found places to push harder against the big national rivals it already knew about, and one finding better than all of that: a term drawing fifty thousand searches a month for a product the brand actually sells, with no company of any size competing for it. That's a business's dream scenario: 600K searches a year, completely unserved.The documentation we delivered proposed specific plans for every finding, ready to hand to the team doing the work.

How does this work pay for itself

It depends on the business. Some of our clients have operating models in which just one or two additional sales cover the cost of an engagement, and others are playing for position in markets where the value arrives over quarters. Consultations are free, so the sensible first step is to contact us and book one. We will work through the economics of your situation with you and help you understand whether the work is worth your money.

Who runs the work

Burchett & Co. was founded by Jeff Burchett, and he runs every engagement personally. He is a marketing executive with more than twenty years of experience, most recently as VP of Marketing, Brand & Creative at Custom Ink, and before that leading marketing and e-commerce for ThinkGeek at GameStop. He and his family live in Fort Collins.

How we work

We lead with curiosity and humility, and we follow the data: science first, art second, with form following function.We start by working to understand your business and your goals as deeply as we can. Once we have a handle on your business, we work to understand the markets you think you are competing in and the ones the algorithms think you are competing in, which are rarely 100% the same. We do competitive teardowns so you can see the true nature of the businesses you are up against, and then we develop the strategy and tactics to earn more customers.We listen intently, and we build strategy that survives board scrutiny alongside implementation plans that survive being handed to the team that has to execute them. Because we've been on the wrong side of both of these scenarios in the past, we understand how important it is for the work to make sense to the people who fund it and excite the people who do it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this SEO?

Burchett & Co. is not an SEO agency, and the core of what we provide is not SEO. However, it's becoming an increasingly unwise business decision to ignore the algorithms. They are the new gatekeepers of brand introductions, they decide which companies get recommended and how those companies get described, and they are reshaping whole markets at a pace not seen in our lifetimes. We've reached a point at which, for many people, whatever an algorithm says your brand is about is the only thing they're going to know about your brand. If it can't recommend you, or maybe even worse, if it represents you incorrectly to someone, that's a customer you're never going to serve.It's been a long and winding road since the early days of the Internet, but how did we get here? Through the nineties, search was a pleasant extra that companies enjoyed: dozens of engines with different ideas about what mattered and attribution that barely worked. Traffic was too unpredictable to plan around. When Google consolidated the field, the algorithms converged and the results steadied, and search became a marketing discipline with a revenue number attached, because rank reliably produced clicks and clicks reliably produced customers. Zero-click results and AI answers have now separated rank from traffic, and the math that a generation of funnel models was built on no longer predicts much of anything. Like the Bain research says: people just aren't clicking like they used to.Something entirely new is emerging. There is performance marketing, there is brand marketing aimed at people, and there is now brand marketing aimed at algorithms. We're still in the early days so wins today compound, because placement earns attention and attention produces the signals that earn more placement. The positions available today will cost considerably more to take later because once you get a flywheel running, it's a whole lot harder to slow it down.Part of our proprietary tooling is dedicated to understanding how algorithms see your company, your competitors, and your market at large, and we help businesses show up, be recommendable, and get recommended by search engines, AI tools, LLMs, and chatbots.

How long does an engagement take?

Different engagements take different amounts of time. A competitive snapshot can take as little as a week or two, and longer ongoing engagements are available. There is no one-size-fits-all menu. We scope each engagement to fit, so you are only paying for what you actually need.

How much of this falls on my team?

As much or as little as you choose. We'll need your help to understand your business in the ways only you understand it, but beyond that initial data gathering and your feedback as the work progresses, nothing more is required. You can hire us to deliver a consultancy report covering your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, with an action plan tailored to your business and your customers, and hand it to your own team, or you can have us carry the work all the way through implementation.

Can I do this myself?

Probably not, and the reason is the tooling. We built our own analytical instruments because no commercially available tool did the work we needed done. Our model combines empirically observable business and firmographic research, market and marketing intelligence, and algorithmic visibility into one picture of the opportunity, and that picture is the foundation of everything we recommend. You could certainly update your website and study your competitors, and the plans you made would probably be good ones. What you could not do is replicate the intelligence engine underneath our methodology. Plenty of consultancies talk about bridging art and science, but we really do it.

What does an engagement cost?

Engagements are scoped individually, because what a business needs depends on its market and what it already has in place. Most of our engagements start in the range of $8,000 to $10,000. Tell us what you are working on and we will tell you how we would approach it and what it would cost.

I'm in Fort Collins. Can we hang out? Will you come to our office?

Yes, absolutely.

Do you work on-site with companies in Denver?

Yes, generally. Get in touch and let's talk about what you need.