This excerpt is from SEJ VIP contributor Corey Morris’ new book, “The Digital Marketing Success Plan.”
In the most disruptive and disruptive times in the history of digital marketing, and SEO in particular, we are testing and experimenting faster than ever before. With change happening so rapidly, it's crucial to have a documented, actionable, and accountable plan for your digital marketing efforts.
In his new book, Corey Morris details his five-step START planning process to help brands develop their own digital marketing success plan, keeping ROI and business outcomes at the heart of everything they do, while giving them the bandwidth and agility to keep up with the rapid changes happening in digital and search marketing.
Search Engine Journal has an exclusive feature on the first step of the START planning process, the “S for Strategy,” detailing the four steps of this first and most important phase.
Chapter 3: The S in Strategy
The Strategy phase is the most comprehensive part of the START planning process. All subsequent phases depend on the work performed and defined in this phase.
The strategy works through profiling, auditing, research and goal setting. Knowing what marketing has been done in the past, what the current situation is, and most importantly, where you want to go is crucial at this point and to your entire digital marketing success plan.
There are four steps in the Strategy phase, the first step is Profile, which is the easier step since it just involves gathering information and definitions.
But it is a tricky task as it can be misunderstood and requires experts to ask the right questions. This includes details of the team involved in the effort, the product (service) you need to sell, your brand and the definition of your target audience.
That means we're laying out the details of who we are, our resources, and our capabilities. We're identifying what we're selling, what value it has, how we deliver it, and what our pricing model is. We also need to figure out how our brand is positioned, differentiated, and what the equity value is.
And most importantly, you need to know who your target customer personas are, their customer behavior, and their funnel or path to purchase.
Anyone can easily describe their customer base and target audience, but as a business grows, it becomes much harder to come to a mutually agreed upon understanding of what you're selling, who you're selling to, and how much it will cost to sell.
I say all of this so that you don't get bogged down in the difficult details here, and also because I know that if it's easy for you, you might want to try some things, dig deeper, and see if you can really get agreement and buy-in.
The second step in the Strategy phase is the Audit. You need to take stock of what you've done in the past and what you're doing now to get a holistic view of what worked, what didn't work, and why. The audit is critical at this point, and this step can be one of the most time-consuming in the entire process of developing a digital marketing success plan.
When obtaining or creating documentation of past activity, you need access to all networks and platforms, past and present. You can then do a deep dive into the audit based on what has been done in the past and what is available to you right now: technical paid search, technical SEO, content SEO, web systems, email marketing systems, etc.
The third step in the Strategy phase is Investigate. Up until now, the focus has been on who we are and what we've done to get to where we are today. In this phase, we gain perspective beyond our own data and understanding.
Here, we seek internal perspectives from marketing, sales, operations, product and other relevant teams and stakeholders, as well as customers and clients. Additionally, we also conduct external research to gain new insights and validate ideas about our competitors, target audiences and what future opportunities we predict or model.
The final stage of strategy is goals. By taking a thorough look at who we are, where we are, and what the opportunities are, we can workshop and arrive at realistic goals. We may have come into this process with our own goals, or we may be starting from scratch at this point.
Either way, this step is critical to the rest of the process and creating a plan that will lead to success. This is where you consider your business goals and how marketing will impact them, and make sure you set the right expectations before taking your strategy from idea to action.
“We have a problem” – The story of a luxury roofing manufacturer
A luxury roofing manufacturing company came to us with a unique problem: Marcy, the company's Marketing Manager, had had a lot of success with SEO, website and email marketing, and larger campaigns to drive traffic to their websites and boost sales efforts for both homeowners and contractors.
Marcy has worked with a few different agencies over the past few years. She's had a variety of experiences with each agency. She worked with some great agencies for a while, then some agencies that didn't prioritize SEO or didn't know much about it. At the time, she didn't realize that SEO was a side job for some agencies. Her SEO was going well, she had good rankings, good traffic, nothing out of the ordinary.
One day, Marcy notices an issue with her Google Analytics. Traffic is starting to drop across the board. Being familiar with reports and channels, she investigates immediately and diagnoses it as an SEO issue within a minute. SEO traffic is dropping, but she doesn't know why.
The agency says everything is fine on their side, and Marcy can't find any errors on the site. But there's a mysterious drop in Google rankings, dropping it from its previous position, and the evidence is in the subsequent drop in traffic, conversions, and form submissions to the sales team.
She reached out because she remembered working with me a few years ago at another agency. She saw me as someone she could trust to solve any SEO problem she had, and I appreciated that. I was at a conference in Silicon Valley and was getting ready to go on stage to speak about troubleshooting SEO.
The irony for me was, right after I finished the speech, I had a long phone conversation with Marcy, and I was able to jump in and see the same things that she did, and I knew right away that we needed to do a full audit and understand what was going on.
I brought the rest of my team back on the challenge, and within two days we had diagnosed two very serious issues that were hiding and going unnoticed by most people, and that we would never have found if we hadn't performed an analytical audit process that dug that deep.
We presented these findings to Marcy and her CEO, and they both understood how hugely negatively this would impact the business if they didn't fix it.
We presented three options. The first was to fix the technical issues within the current site. However, because we were forward-thinking and ROI-oriented, we didn't want to just plug the holes and wait for the next problem to occur. So we presented two other plans, a mid-term and a long-term plan to not only build a new website and fix the issues, but also strategically strengthen a few other aspects.
They chose to invest in a new website, which turned into an ongoing relationship with us to monitor and enhance their SEO and take it to new heights. Not only did they regain what they had lost, but they broke new ground. And I'm thrilled that we got to see it through to the end. It unfolded exactly as we predicted and was borne out by their growth.
Ultimately, the company was sold for a record amount and won awards from its peers for its work. The moral of this story is not just to accept the status quo but to recognize that not all professionals with SEO in their title have equal skills. Audits are a critical tool for getting to the root cause, not just to solve the immediate problem but even more so for long-term success.
“We need to get this right” A story from a continuing care retirement community
Jamal found us on Google. He was the Director of Admissions and Marketing for a luxury retirement facility that serves as a continuing care community, offering everything an active senior wants through independent living, chef-designed restaurant meals, activities, a pub, and continuing care including assisted living and skilled nursing.
They have an excellent reputation and are well known within the city, but throughout the community, and they needed help reaching their target audience: potential residents and the adult children who will impact their lives – the next generation.
When something happens and it is time to seek out such a living arrangement, people who are at that critical stage are less aware and less prepared for the conversations they will have to have with their loved ones at such a critical time in their lives. These are the people who should have been moved to research and take action towards hospitalization.
And while they were a wealthy, luxury hotel, they were also a non-profit, very charitable, and gave a lot to the community. They had low margins and didn't have a huge marketing budget, but they knew they had to do something.
When Jamal came to us, his challenge was, “I know you can do anything. I think we need everything that falls under the digital marketing umbrella. We also need a new website, but we don't have the budget.”
We said, “That's not a problem. We're going to start small with a lot of clients and find the areas where we can get the biggest ROI and impact. Then we'll build from there and create a budget and put money into investing in other opportunities.”
So we went in and analyzed their customers. They had a wealth of data. They knew their business inside and out, and it was great for us to see that. But they needed help understanding digital marketing, and they just couldn't connect the dots.
They spoke to three or four other providers offering expensive products and services, but they weren’t willing to work together to find the right solution or the most cost-effective solution.
We went back to them and said, “You should start with SEO.”
Jamal laughed, saying it was the opposite of the advice he'd received from several other agencies, who said, “No, you should start with $100,000 a month on Google Ads.”
Although I knew the challenge was that we couldn’t build a new website, I said, ‘You should start doing SEO on a small part of it.’ We had to work with their old website and optimize what was already there.
We knew that by telling our story, getting our content right, and optimizing our under-quality website, we could make a big step forward in our long-term efforts to draw new leads to our website. We knew that all it took was for just a handful of people to find our site, understand what we did at the right time, hear the right story, and walk through our doors and experience this amazing place.
After gaining momentum with each lead, we were able to discuss a new website, activate additional marketing channels, and layer on aspects of our digital marketing success plan to set us up for long-term success.
Eventually, they grew as a business and their marketing investments increased. Eventually, they were acquired by a large hospital system where they could all thrive and spread their mission and message.
The moral of the story is that doing something is always better than doing nothing.
But if you're on a budget, understand that the obvious or expensive answers aren't always the best answers. Dig into the data, work hard, and find opportunities to create a new budget.
Each small success adds up to bigger accomplishments.
To learn more about why digital marketing planning is so important, Corey's START planning process, and how to implement it, which is detailed throughout the book (including real stories about each phase of the process and “how to” sections), download the book now on Amazon.
For a limited time only, until July 17th, the Kindle version is just 99 cents.
For more information and free resources, visit https://thedmsp.com.
Additional resources:
Featured image: nuruddean/Shutterstock
