Digital Strategy
The cornerstone of your entire digital marketing effort, the digital strategy will help you understand where you are positioned online, and what you need to do to generate more sales through your website.What is a Digital Strategy?
A Digital Strategy (sometimes called a Web Marketing Strategy) is the road map of any company’s marketing plan. It lets you figure out what you need to build, where you need to focus on, and what will give you the biggest results for the lowest spend.
This will not only determine how the website should work, which areas of the website should be highlighted, but also how the website should be presented, which keywords need to be ranked highly for, and which demographics have the highest rate of close, and therefore should be the most desirable targets for lead generation.
Our final digital strategy is created in conjunction with you to address your specific needs, in the specific way that you do business to target the specific customers who are most likely to buy from you. The best predictor of these customers are customers who have purchased from you before.
A Collaborative Process
Our final digital strategy is created in conjunction with you to address your specific needs, in the specific way that you do business to target the specific customers who are most likely to buy from you. The best predictor of these customers are customers who have purchased from you before.
How the Digital Strategy Gets Built
What you bring to the table
For a typical Digital Strategy we have an onboarding form that answers a number of questions about your brand, mission statement, competition, and your current situation (number of leads), as well as what you’re looking to get out of any changes.
This information is incredibly important for us. While we can look at other comparable companies in your industry, every business is unique, and your challenges are different than your competition. You also have a better insight into who is actually beating you on bids vs who is outranking you online.
What we bring to the table
We provide an outside view into your business and can show you things that you may not be aware of. We bring a wealth of practical experience with us, having produced strategies for many companies over the past twenty years.
NorthIQ has worked with B2B companies, and B2C companies of all shapes and sizes from large media giants to your local sole proprietor comic shop. We understand the unique challenges that companies face in the rapidly changing digital landscape, and we understand that your business is completely unique and entirely different.
However, whether it’s B2B or B2C, we are all dealing with the universal “P” – people. The tactics we use to reach a CEO and the buyer of a new home are still surprisingly similar.
Specific Tactics for Your Digital Strategy
On Site Downloads:
A simple, 1-2 page download that explains a specific product or service is an example of a low friction, yet
still valuable asset. We would would only require firstname, lastname, email and an optin. Once opted into the system with the least amount of information, they would be put into the lead warming queue.
This will immediately increase the overall lead number, but will not affect the final warmed leads.
Specific Informational Whitepapers – for example: 10 Things You Need to Know about Product or Service, are higher quality content and can demand higher friction forms – these forms would ask more targeting questions which move the prospect down the chain from “lead” to “opportunity”.
These targeted questions might be:
When do you plan on making your purchase?
Where are you in the buying cycle?
Have you made a similar investment in the past?
The idea of these questions is to begin to establish a larger view of the prospect and figure out which targeted messages we need to deliver in the future.
Marketing Automation
Depending on the tools the company is using, and their willingness to adopt new technologies, this can be simple or incredibly robust.
Using a simple platform like MailChimp or Constant Contact, we can build an automated email marketing system that has multiple touch points, and takes our low friction leads and converts them into high information leads with better lead quality.
There are big limitations to this method, and by using more sophisticated marketing automation software, we can do a much better job of just in time marketing, and moving people along the chain as they progress along the buyer’s journey.
Learn about Marketing Automation
Online Interactive Tool
The ultimate goal would be to get the leads to self select into filling out an online tool which provides them a ton of value by answering questions specific to their situation, yet also provides a lot of information as to what type of a buyer they are and what the fit is for your organization.
Once they have filled in the interactive tool, the lead is either completely sales ready, disqualified, or put into a long term lead warming scenario.
Your Marketing Roadmap
In the digital strategy, we consider a number of things that are unique to your situation. We look at your current state, all of the things you are doing currently and all of the ways that you get leads, as well as what the internal processes are for leads, how they are assigned, and what happens during your entire sales pipeline.
Example current state vs desired state:
Current State:
- Gross revenue of $2.5 per month
- 100 leads a month with 10 opportunities per month from all sources
- Marketing primarily accomplished through SEO on the website
- Moderate advertising spend with a 1.2% click through rate, and a 25% form success rate.
Desired State:
- Increase revenue by 20%
- Turn website into primary lead generation engine
- Increase the qualified opportunities to 60 per month from all sources
- Short term (6 month goal): Generate 300 leads per month to be warmed.
- Build a system to communicate with the remaining leads to keep them engaged in a long funnel.
Technical Improvements
In addition to the content and marketing strategies we develop, we also do a deep dive on your website and tell you specific things you can do to improve your organic search rankings and improve overall user experience.
Examples of improvements to your digital strategy include
- Improved website response times
- Secure https pages
- Proper semantic HTML useage
- Microformat improvements to generate proper snippets on social media sites
- Keywords being used by competitors and your current rankings
- Errors found on your website as reported by crawling engines
- Overall improvements to your navigation
- Suggestions for better social media use
Getting More Leads
We review conversion benchmark reports for your specific industry to see what a good industry average is.
As an example, we may find, an average conversion rate for the “real estate” market is 2.9%, with the top 90th percentile being at 8.7%.
Pages we generate tend to convert in the top 80-90%, so a 7% conversion rate is reasonable. In this industry, simple and accessible language is important, the predicted conversion rate for a landing page written at the 6th grade level was nearly double that written at a university reading level (using the Flesch Reading Ease test).
Additionally, shorter, more concise landing pages converted 33% more for this segment than long landing pages.
Adding this information to your digital strategy helps you to understand what kind of returns you can expect from your content marketing efforts, and gives you some simple metrics to figure out if your current traffic levels are high enough to generate the levels of leads that you’re expecting to create.
In the scenario above, if we need to generate 300 leads a month, with a 7% conversion rate, we would need to see traffic of approximately 4,000 sessions per month.
The Final Output
Our typical digital strategy document is between 20-40 pages. We present your digital strategy as a Google Document which allows us to collaborate with you during the entire process, as well as a summary deck which gives you a high level roadmap of the insights and the suggestions.
In the finished document we will collaborate with you to understand your business vision, we’ll document all technologies available and provide a gap analysis on what needs to be done to improve technology and marketing in order to meet the business vision.
it is an entirely turn key document and can be used to hand off to any internal or external stakeholder to get a full view of the business vision, technology roadmap, and marketing roadmap.
Alternatively, you can work in partnership with NorthIQ to accelerate your implementation of your custom digital strategy.
Read all of our posts about Digital Marketing
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