Cory Marazzo
Founder of WCKD Marketing
Ontario, Canada
I find what is holding a business back and build the fix
A stalled business rarely has a marketing shortage. It has a constraint, and until you find it, more spend makes the same result more expensive. So the order never changes: find the constraint, clear it by building a base that converts, then scale.
What I do
I cover the full range: brand development, online presence, demand generation, sales enablement and performance optimization.
In larger organizations the problem often sits between departments, where nobody owns the gap. That is usually where I start. And because the person who diagnoses the problem stays accountable for the result, a question comes back with an answer, not a hand-off.
How I work
Everything runs through WCKD Marketing. One documented method keeps the standard the same whoever does the work, and what gets built transfers to your team instead of staying with me. Your people run it. The engagement is designed to end with capability, not dependency.
Most larger clients already have marketing and communications teams. I work beside them, online, and supply the technical depth wherever the job touches. When a project needs designers, photographers, videographers or content creators, I bring them in, locally when that matters to you, and each piece stays isolated: if one slips, the system does not. Teams move faster when one vision keeps them pointed the same way.
How I got here
2005 to 2008 · Durham College, Oshawa
Studied Multimedia Design and Development, and in second year, June 2006, took my first freelance clients. The work was simple: build the website. Then a pattern started, and it never stopped: every couple of years the finished work exposed the next problem, and the next problem became the next skill.
2006 to 2015 · The stack builds
A good website nobody could find taught me search. Search that took months to pay off taught me Google Ads. Traffic that never became leads taught me conversion. Pages that could not convert because the offer was muddy taught me messaging. And leads that died quietly in an inbox taught me sales enablement, because getting the lead is only half the job. None of those businesses had a marketing shortage. Each one had a single bottleneck, and everything bought before it was found had been wasted on top of it.
2009 to 2014 · Fleming College, Peterborough
Worked five years part-time as the college web developer, and the sole front-end developer and designer on the full rebuild of the main college website. That design stayed in service for about six years, which is a long life for a website and still the bar I hold work to.
June 2015 · WCKD Marketing
Opened WCKD Marketing in Peterborough as a full-service agency, incorporated in March 2018, and registered WCKD MARKETING as a Canadian trademark (TMA991087). By then I had watched the same story repeat across more than two hundred businesses: manufacturing, trades, healthcare, real estate, hospitality, software, and most of the business-support infrastructure of a region. The stalled ones were never short of activity. They had one constraint, usually sitting where nobody owned it, with campaigns stacked on top.
2020 · The breaking point
Businesses running fragmented marketing, search from one vendor, ads from another, a website nobody owned, buckled under the complexity. They did not need another vendor. They needed a system. So I stepped back and spent two years turning fifteen years of pattern into one documented method, the WCKD Marketing OS.
February 2021 · Fully remote
Moved to Toronto and took the practice fully remote. The Peterborough office closed, and the team became independent specialists working under their own brands.
2024 · Markham, Ontario
Moved to Markham and restructured the business around the operating system, now in use with early adopters. Clients across Canada, most in Ontario, and every engagement runs on the OS.
Record
In practice since 2006, with more than 200 businesses worked with closely across manufacturing, trades, healthcare, real estate, hospitality, software and regional business support.
In the Peterborough region that includes most of the business-support infrastructure: the Innovation Cluster, Peterborough DBIA, Peterborough Tourism and Economic Development, the Peterborough and the Kawarthas Chamber of Commerce, Community Futures Eastern Ontario and the Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough. Elsewhere it includes LifeLabs, RE/MAX Eastern Realty, The Daniels Corporation and BRC Group.
Along the way I built the tools WCKD Marketing runs on: the WCKD Marketing OS, WCKD UI, WCKD Forms and WCKD Sites.
Recognition includes Google Partner status, a Recognition of Excellence Award from the Innovation Cluster, and a top-three rating among web designers in Peterborough.