a beginner’s guide to a marketing strategy€¦ · integrated marketing effort is stronger than...

A Beginner’s Guide to a

Marketing Strategy

www.topfloortech.com

Index03 Introduction 04 Putting Together Your Digital Marketing Strategy09 Pulling Together Your Digital Marketing Strategy12 Implementing Your Digital Marketing Strategy15 Reality of What to Expect21 Believers Win – Skeptics Not So Much25 Where to Start31 Summary

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One of my client’s Director of Marketing left to go to a new firm. This was a global firm with locations all over the world. It was also at a time when this company was just about to embark on developing a new website. The web project was significant because the site needed to deliver a tremendous amount of information and would be in multiple languages.

Rather than replace that person with an experienced Marketing Director the company decided to promote a product manager to the position. This product manager had deep knowledge of the company and its products but had never held a marketing position. This guide was put together with that product manager in mind. Few in today’s market would question that digital marketing is becoming increasingly important and it is the wave of the future. At the same time, digital marketing presents a dizzying array of new channels, technologies, opportunities and challenges. So, with so many things to consider where do you start? Especially if you are new to the digital marketing landscape. How do you quickly get up to speed? This guide is meant to help you answer those questions as well as provide you insights into what to expect as you begin to lead your company’s digital marketing efforts.


Chapter 1:

Putting Together Your Digital

Marketing Strategy


Where to Start: Putting Together Your Digital Strategy

Start with Your Brand and PositioningIt is important to keep in mind that while we are talking about digital marketing, it does not exist in a vacuum. Traditional marketing concepts and channels still apply. In fact, you might even argue that an integrated marketing effort is stronger than digital alone.

What we mean by an “integrated” marketing strategy is developing a marketing strategy that contains both traditional and digital channels that work as an integrated whole. Regardless of whether we are talking traditional or digital marketing they are both marketing and a foundational element of any marketing strategy is your brand.

An integrated marketing effort can be

stronger than digital alone.

As you work to develop your digital strategy the place to start is with a review of your branding and positioning strategy.

•  Do you have one? •  Is it well done?•  Is it comprehensive?


Do You Have a Brand Positioning Statement?If you have a well-defined branding and positioning strategy you likely will have a brand standards guide that documents what the strategy is along with how to utilize certain branding assets such as your logo and tag line. It will also address items such as your Vision and Mission, your brand personality and tone, etc. A brand positioning statement will define how your brand is positioned or is to be positioned against your competition. Are you the high price high value alternative or the firm that competes on price? Are you more formal or casual? Are you the most technically astute or the easiest to work with? In short your brand will state who you are, what you stand for and how you want people to think about your company. Every company has a brand, the question you will need to answer is, is your brand already well defined or not? If so do you think it is appropriate or does it need to be refined?


The Branding & Positioning ProcessWhile every marketing executive or firm may follow a somewhat different process (most try to insist that there’s is unique and the best process), the basic process and deliverables are similar. Below is a list of the various items that typically go into developing one’s branding and positioning statements.

Interview individual members of your team•  Reveal what they feel your brand strengths and weaknesses are. •  How would they describe your brand?

Interview customers and prospects to achieve two things•  How do they perceive your brand?•  For current customers: Why do they buy from you rather than

the competition?

Do the market researchSee how your competition is presenting themselves and what you perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses.

Evaluate the specific types of people you sell to•  What are their titles, their industries?•  What are the challenges they face as well as what they value?


Elements of Your BrandAfter gathering all of this information your brand strategy team will propose various branding and positioning options. Once the brand is established you will have some semblance of the following items.


BrandElements

Branding and position for a company can be developed using a formal process that would include many of the elements listed in the chart or it can be as informal as the owner of the company and its management team suggesting this is what we stand for and creating these brand elements based on their opinion as to how they want to position themselves.

The key element for you, as the person in charge of your digital marketing strategy is this: do you have a solid brand strategy you can work with or do you need to work on better developing and documenting your branding and positioning.

Chapter 2:

Pulling Together Your Digital

Marketing Strategy


Pro Tip

One the next page we lay out a step-by-step plan for pulling together your digital marketing strategy. We encourage you to print the process out and keep it handy for future reference if you’d like to go back and revisit the steps.


Pulling Together Your Digital Marketing StrategyNow that you know who you are, what you stand for and what you want people to think about when they are exposed to your brand, you are ready to start putting together your strategy.

Remember your brand is more than a logo. It represents your company and what you promise to your clients.

Digital Strategy Step-By-Step Process

1.  What are your sales goals and objectives?a.  By product or service lineb.  By markets

2.  Brain storming workshop a.  What do you want to sell and who do you want to sell it to? b.  What is happening in the market?

i.  Market trendsii.  Issues your audience struggles withiii.  Events – tradeshows, conferences, etc.

c.  Key words analysisi.  What search terms will people use when searching for the

products and services you sell? ii.  What search terms might the people you want to sell to use to

solve typical problems they encounter whether directly related to the product and services you sell or not?

d.  Develop content ideas3.  Develop a marketing calendar that shows what information you will be

promoting each month. 4.  Select what channels you will be using to promote the content (Ex;

email, SEO, PPC, Social Media, Display advertising, etc.)5.  Develop budgets for channels, content development and campaigns.

.


Chapter 3:

Implementing Your Digital

Marketing Strategy


Setup Work for ImplementationYour marketing efforts will include both developing the assets you will use in running a campaign and then actually running campaigns and monitoring the results. We refer to the development of the assets as setup work.

Setup Work•  Website•  Landing Pages•  Content Pieces

o  eBookso  White Paperso  Infographicso  Blog Articleso  Video Surveys

•  Trackingo  Defining KPI’s (key performance indicators)o  Installing and configuring analyticso  Establishing a reporting cadenceo  Connecting lead generation with CRM


Implementing of Your Digital StrategyMarketing Calendar – It is the tool that will guide what setup work needs to be done at what time and which campaigns need to be run. It serves as the guide to keep your marketing efforts on track.

Manage the team - Especially if you have a robust marketing plan, that effort will include a team of people that bring different levels of expertise and capabilities to the table. It is important to have a strong account executive or project manager to coordinate the efforts of the team.

Track your Results - In order to get the best return from your marketing it is important to track the results. It is important to track the results not just to report on performance and ROI but also to use the data to inform changes that will help you achieve an even greater return. This is where having a certified digital analyst can be so helpful.

Set the Schedule – For the review process prior to implementing your strategy and commit to staying with that process.


Chapter 4:

The Reality: What You Can

Expect



Typical Issues and ObservationsAccountability:

Keeping up with all the work that has to go into implementing a strong digital marketing effort is not easy. This is why it is so important to have a marketing calendar that assigns specific responsibilities, with specific deadlines, to specific individuals within your company. The reality is that some deadlines will be missed. They may be missed because the effort required to do the work was underestimated. It is possible unknown events pulled those people responsible in different directions. It may be due to negligence. Your company culture is going to come through here and it will dictate a productive or harmful result. How do you hold people accountable and do they accept that or does your culture allow or even encourage passing the buck. Keep in mind while sometimes justified the easiest target for an internal team to blame is the agency. Think about how you are going to deal with that.

Creating a marketing calendar helps lay out the responsibilities and deadlines to team members

Pro Tip

Results & TrackingThe ultimate goal of your marketing efforts is to increase your company’s revenue. Your efforts to tie results and tracking together are important. At the same time, it is important to put into context what realistically can be tracked and when more subjective measures of success are appropriate. Running a Perfect Marketing Campaign (aka Nirvana)•  You run a campaign.•  That campaign generates a lead that is fed into your CRM and

assigned to a rep.•  The rep then converts that lead into a sale.•  Whoa, you are a revenue generation engineer/hero.

The reality is, that while you want to work toward this type of reporting, thinking that it is going to be what tells you the whole story or will carry the day is misleading. It is simply not that simple. See more below in “Believers Win - Skeptics not so much” section of this eBook.


Using Tracking & Analytics as Tools… Not RoadblocksThe Tracking ParadoxThe more you track the better you will be able to see an ROI. It’s impossible to track everything. Work as hard as possible to attach sales to the lead source because digital makes that more possible than ever. At the very least setup goals in Google Analytics to track form submissions, etc. A professional digital marketer can get much more sophisticated than just tracking these elements but it is a good place to start. Recognize that you simply can’t fully track your ROI because it is not that simple.

Attribution - the concept of attribution is that a prospect may have interacted with many elements of your marketing efforts during the buying and selection process. If they do, what channel do you attribute the acquisition of the customer to?

It’s impossible to fully identify each interaction and impact that, that interaction had on the prospect.



Recognize the Shortcomings ofTracking ApplicationsThere are countless numbers of analytics applications that can be used to track the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. One of the most popular is Google Analytics. This can be very powerful to help understand how your site is being used, how it performs, etc. However, it can also be misleading if you are not clear on how to use the data and what data should be validated before being used to inform your marketing decision.

One of the most common mistakes I see is going to the bank with Google conversion tracking. When set up properly, Google Analytics can report on the number of forms people fill out when visiting your site; RFQ forms, contact forms, etc. However, if you do not validate the content of those forms/leads you will not be getting a clear picture of how your marketing efforts are performing.

Google Analytics can help a company collect data regarding how their site is being used and how it is performing.

Pro Tip


Tracking Applications Example

Top Floor provides digital marketing services including SEO content development, etc. Probably over half of the forms filled out on our own website come from people looking to sell us digital marketing services. If I were to assume that all of those GA (Google Analytics) conversions where true leads I’d be wondering what my business development team is doing with them all and why we didn’t do a few million dollars in extra business last year.

This is why we always encourage working to connect conversion data with the actual content associated with those conversions. Keep in mind that I am specifically addressing forms here but it is the same with phone call tracking, etc. You will never have the full picture but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to continue to make efforts toward that goal.

It’s important to remember to work to connect actual conversion data with the content associated with those conversions.

Pro Tip

Chapter 5:

Believers Win – Skeptics Not So

Much


Believers WinSkeptics Not So MuchIn the Bible Thomas, the disciple, didn’t believe that Jesus had risen until he was able to see Jesus and touch his wounds. That is where the term doubting Thomas comes from. Unfortunately when it comes to marketing this is how many company owners and leaders approach marketing. The discussion goes something like this. If you can prove to me this marketing investment is generating sales and I’m getting a good return I’ll keep spending more. While this is a logical comment and is well intended, in reality it is the “idiot insult” question in reverse. The “idiot insult” question is when a sales person ask a question like; If I can show you proof that by investing $10,000 in my product it will earn you an additional $1,000,000 in revenue will you buy it? You see, while that perspective of, if you show me I am getting a return I’ll keep spending more comes from a good place more often than not it is coming from a skeptic that is simply not a believer in the power of marketing.


Marketing Produces More than Just Lead GenerationWhile you can invest a good deal of time laying out the logical case of why marketing is so important and why they should invest significant company money and resources into it they still doubt. They don’t have the level of faith that is important to have if one wants to fully enjoy the strength of digital marketing investments. The reason it will be difficult for this kind of company to reap the benefits of a strong digital strategy is that effective marketing will always require a certain leap of faith. Effective marketing has both short and long term benefits. Doubting Thomas’s focus so much on the short term that they sabotage their ability to enjoy the benefit of what a strong commitment to effective marketing can provide. A truly effective marketing effort produces more than just leads•  Keeps your brand visible over time•  Instills in the market a certain perception of your company When done properly it will be a perception that makes your company preferred over alternatives, not only by prospects and customers but also by the talent you need to succeed in the market place.

This will be due to both a public facing persona but also because of the impact a proper branding and positioning process can have on how your company is managed.


Effective Brand PositionDefines Who You AreAn effective brand position defines who you are and why that is important to attracting and retaining customers. That definition provides a powerful management tool in that your brand can be used to coalesce your organization around a common goal and purpose. Having a well-defined common goal and purpose that aligns with the things most valued by your customers and prospects is what a strong brand is all about. Using your brand promise as a constant reminder to teammates that this is who we are and what we stand for, can be a powerful and transformational management tool. Last but not least, it is important to recognize that the reason one markets, is that while face to face interaction is still the ultimate in representing your brand, face to face efforts simply can’t provide the reach that a marketing effort can. That is why when one thinks about marketing they need to consider. If you can reach all of your customers and keep your message prominent in their minds at all times only with your sales force than why bother investing in marketing? The reality is anyone that thinks they can do this is kidding themselves.


Chapter 6:

Where to Start


Where to Start?This eBook has provided an outline of how to develop a comprehensive marketing plan. As you read through it and start to think about all of the elements that need to be addressed it can be daunting. That is why it is important to start by taking an assessment of where you are as a company and then create a plan that makes sense for your situation. That will include a few elements.

•  How important does the company feel digital marketing is to their long term success. Is a strong digital marketing program going to be strategically critical for the company to achieve its profit and revenue goals or is it a less critical supporting function.

•  What can you realistically afford or does it make sense to invest in marketing? A fifty million dollar company can obviously invest a much greater amount of money into digital marketing than a million dollar company. Based on a percentage of revenue or operation budget what investment ranges are realistic to consider?


Comprehensive Search Marketing PlansComprehensive is a nice adjective. What does it mean? It is easy to describe a marketing plan as comprehensive but let’s face it, that is just an adjective to describe the scale of what you are doing. You can always do more. With that said let me describe a way that breaks down comprehensive into two main categories of digital marketing.

Search Marketing and Content MarketingWithin digital marketing there are really two main efforts. Search marketing and content marketing. In this context I refer to search marketing as the efforts you make to be found on the search engines when people are shopping for what you sell.


Search Marketing

ContentMarketing

A Search Marketing Only ApproachWhile it is somewhat of an oxymoron to use the adjective “traditional” in the context of digital marketing I’d suggest that search marketing is “traditional” when it comes to digital marketing. Search marketing is where it all started and is or still should be a fundamental aspect of your digital marketing efforts. As opposed to the broader aspect of content marketing that gets into looking at what kind of information is important to your target prospects or personas and the work to reach them by publishing that type of information and making it discoverable, search marketing in the “traditional” sense is aimed at being found for the specific products or services you sell at the time that someone is looking for a source of those products or services. It is also focused primarily around directing people to the product and service pages of your company’s website. If you are doing both “traditional” search marketing and content marketing I would describe that as being a “comprehensive” digital marketing strategy. However, if investing in a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is unrealistic due to the cost and internal resources required to manage it, a great place to start is to focus on “traditional search marketing”.


Start with Traditional Search MarketingThe reason I would suggest you start with traditional search marketing, especially if you are unable to invest in a more comprehensive digital marketing strategy is twofold. One is that it is still one of the most profitable forms of digital marketing. Investing in being found when people are looking to do business with a company like yours is golden. Secondly, while some upfront collaboration with your partner provider is necessary it does not require near the amount of time and internal resources from your team that is needed to deploy a significant content marketing effort.


A traditional search marketing effort will involve three core elements: 1.  Your website2.  Ongoing SEO (Search Engine Optimization effort) 3.  Paid Search (PPC, Google Adwords, Bing ad, etc.)

Pro Tip

It’s important to remember to work to connect actual conversion data with the content associated with those conversions

Search MarketingThings to ConsiderAs you begin your journey to improve how you market yourselves on-line, a good place to start is to evaluate your “traditional search marketing” effectiveness. A review or audit of these three areas of your digital marketing efforts will typically reveal low hanging fruit that can be addressed and produce tangible results.

Is your website well designed from a SEO perspective and conversion perspective? It is still your most important digital marketing asset. Is it getting the attention it deserves?

Are you investing in ongoing SEO efforts? SEO is not a one shot deal. There are always more things you can do to make sure your listings rise to the top of the search engines and in addition algorithms continually change. It is important you have people highly skilled and dedicated to this area of digital marketing continually working to gain high visibility for the search terms related to the products and services you sell.

Are you using paid search? If so, how well are your paid search efforts designed? This is a channel that when done well can produce great results and provide valuable intelligence. At the same time, it is probably one of the easiest ways to blow valuable marketing dollars if it is not well managed by people that specialize in paid search management.


Chapter 7:

Summary


Bringing it All TogetherThe Internet has had an incredible impact on the world and society. Any company that ignores this fact when it comes to how they market themselves is just tempting failure. It may not be immediate but it is hard to imagine that those who ignore it will not pay a heavy price at some time in the future or even in the present. Digital marketing is complex. Some of the concepts are simple. Optimize your on-line content so it tells your story well and is discovered by the people you want to discover it. Designing and implementing a digital marketing effort has many elements and moving parts. The saying “the devil is in the details” definitely applies here. There are millions of details to be managed and often times poorly managing just a few can critically undermine the success one enjoys from their efforts. But it goes beyond the details as well. It is the ability to step back and assess your own company’s current position in the market place. Define where you want to go and then develop a plan- a digital marketing strategy- to help you get there. It requires developing a digital marketing plan that is appropriate and takes into account the level of both financial and human resources you have available in the company. That as well requires a significant level of experience and expertise. Whether you accomplish this by hiring a firm like Top Floor or hiring and building an internal team invest in the expertise you need and then use it to help you design a path for on-line success. A path that will drive your off-line bottom line to new heights.



Elevating Results is what we do.Top Floor is an experienced, award-winning team of marketing professionals. We employ a rigorous process of continuous improvement to create and execute strategic integrated marketing plans that support our clients’ long-term business goals. We value the spirit of partnership with our clients, and believe in open and honest dialogue throughout the working process. Top Floor is committed to providing our clients the highest quality deliverables within their approved budgets, while promoting an atmosphere of collaborative idea generation.

Digital Marketing StrategyTop Floor specializes in helping organizations succeed through elevating their digital marketing results, and is excited about the opportunity to partner with you to maximize your success. The reality is that we can build and monitor effective projects within a range of timelines and budgets. Whether we are working together on branding & positioning, web design & development, search marketing, and/or content marketing, we are committed to open and honest dialogue to elevate your results..

a beginner’s guide to a marketing strategy€¦ · integrated marketing effort is stronger than...

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