OUR APPROACH

HOW WE DEVELOP DIGITAL STRATEGY

How We Deliver This Service

Our approach to Digital Strategy includes these key phases:

• Definition of your unique goals to establish your desired future state
• Analysis of current-state, future-state and the gaps between them
• Introduction of the core digital marketing stack
• Evaluation, selection and integration planning for your upgraded digital marketing stack
• Deployment and integration of digital marketing tools
• Success metrics definition & timing for milestone reporting

Definition Of Your Unique Goals To Establish Your Desired Future State

In this phase, we work with you to define what you want digital marketing to accomplish for your firm. This creates a vision for the future-state of your firm. Our approach produces a master list of goals that usually fall into one of three categories:

• Must-achieve: these are goals that absolutely must be accomplished.
• Like-to-achieve: these are goals you would like to achieve if time and budget allow.
• Nice-to-achieve: these are goals that are more of a bonus.

Our methodology is to analyze with you your website, email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing and other strategies and ask you a set of questions. We want to know what success looks like to you for each of these areas. The result of this phase is that you will have a clear vision of a successful future-state digital marketing program.

Analysis Of Current-State, Future-State And The Gaps Between Them

In this phase, we analyze the digital infrastructure you have in place today. We dig into the details of your existing technologies, and your capabilities to manage those technologies, for your website, email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing and any other systems that you might need. We build a profile of where you are today that clearly describes your current-state.

We also analyze the gaps between current-state and future-state to establish what needs to be done for you to achieve your goals. Usually this results in a master list of projects, technologies and skill-sets that must be brought to bear for you to achieve your desired future-state.

The result of this phase is that you will have a clear understanding of where you are today, where you want to be in the future what is required for you to get there.

Introduction Of The Core Digital Marketing Stack

In this phase, we introduce the core digital marketing stack that we believe needs to be deployed for your organization. We present a range of options from entry-level, to mid-tier to high-end, in terms of expense, flexibility, ease of deployment and feature-sets for the following technologies:

• CMS: content management systems
• MA: marketing automation systems
• SMM: social media management systems
• CRM: client relationship manager systems (if you have not already deployed one)

We explain, at a high level, how these systems need to be integrated for you to achieve your goals. We present specific brands and platforms and discuss our experiences with those platforms and how appropriate we believe they might be for your unique digital ecosystem.

The result of this phase is that you will have a strong grasp of how integrated digital marketing works. You will also have a short-list of potential platforms to evaluate in the next phase.

Evaluation, Selection And Integration Planning Of Your Upgraded Digital Marketing Stack

In this phase, we help you evaluate and select the core systems that will comprise your upgraded digital marketing stack. We help you size the different tools so you are not buying more than you need, saving you a lot of money. We also negotiate pricing and timing of delivery of the stack on your behalf, if you choose to have us do this for you.

We also build a plan, instantiated in the form of a Gantt chart, to deploy and integrate all of the technologies into one new digital ecosystem. The plan makes the work-load and time requirements from your team very clear. The plan delineates what we’ll do versus what you’ll do.

The result of this phase is that your will have a realistic and affordable plan to buy, size, deploy and integrate all the technologies that are appropriate for your upgraded digital marketing stack.

Deployment And Integration Of Digital Marketing Tools

In this phase, we execute the plan. We manage the plan to achieve the results and outcomes we’ve promised you. Project management is a major challenge for any technology implementation, and this is nowhere more true than for digital technologies. We have a history of delivering on schedule and keeping our clients in the loop for what needs to be done to achieve each phase of the overall program.

The result of this phase is that you will have a fully deployed and properly integrated digital marketing stack.

Success Metrics Definition & Timing For Milestone Reporting

In this phase, we define the success metrics that you want to measure for your website, email marketing, social media marketing and content marketing. We also define when these measurements will be collected and analyzed in a report.

Most of our clients prefer to have us build reports twice a year. The reports we build can include:

• Website marketing: total visits, total visitors, pageviews, time-on-page, time-on-site
• Email marketing: total broadcasts, open rates, click rates, opt-out rates, opt-out/in rates
• Social media marketing: total posts, likes, shares, views, conversions
• Content Marketing: registrations, downloads, conversion rates

The result of this phase is that you will know how your digital ecosystem is performing, what is working well and what needs to be improved.

See What Can You Expect for details about the outcomes of this service.

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