Do you get the feeling that it’s not enough to get traffic to your website? That it’s not even enough to get leads?
You need new, quality customers and that takes a complete strategy with an actionable system.
A marketing partner, committed to growing your brand, can help you stay on track and provide the blueprint so you know which path is the right one.
Can you imagine how good it feels to make progress every day with the confidence that you are meeting or beating your goals?
True strategy and road mapping can only be obtained by people who understand all of the tactics and the relationships they have with each other, as well as your specific business goals.
Well-meaning marketing agencies, who are not deep on digital, cannot write your strategy and develop a process that is in line with how far marketing has evolved.
SEO guys or girls who are deep on advanced search may be too in the weeds to see things through, such as:
- Ensuring your brand principles and style guidelines are followed consistently
- Making sure your sales and marketing are aligned
- Following up FAST and ideally using marketing automation to frequently nurture leads from Ebook / white paper downloads
- Positioning yourself as a thought leader, but making sure you are customer-centric first
Social media experts, web designers, and developers have awesome skills but can’t always pull back and look at the bigger picture.
So what’s the plan?
The following are the steps we take to ensure you have a comprehensive and strategic solution, versus a mere list of tactics you’re performing.
This is how you rev your marketing engine and perform “On All Cylinders”:
- Discuss your goals: It is vital that we understand not just your marketing goals, but how they align with your organizational goals. When we align tightly with your goals, we have a better experience together.
- Set up analytics and ROI tracking: Without an understanding of what is driving the best leads, you can’t possibly know with full confidence that you are making the right changes and not moving your marketing backward. We set up analytics to track key performance indicators like number of leads by channel, your conversion rate, and the amount of organic search visitors to your site.
- Assess the situation with advanced competitive analysis: We pay thousands of dollars a month for the best tools for a reason. They give insights you can’t get without “robots, big data and artificial intelligence”. We then apply our knowledge to determine what you’re doing well and where you could improve.
- Create a strategy: Do you have a reasonably formal marketing plan? If not, you will soon learn why it is essential to have a simple document to reference that keeps us on track with the big picture.
Our strategy starts by documenting a small amount of information for each of these things below.
We have additional in-depth options to fit each unique situation.
- Marketing Strategy Summary
- Business / Marketing Goals
- Your Competitors
- SWOT – Your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats
- Budget – Set a realistic number (5% of revenue to maintain, 10% to grow, 7% average according to cmosurvey.org)
- Timing – First, we list a few key dates and later each task gets a date
- Project Management Tool – We use Smartsheet so you can see all deliverables and progress, but you do not need to learn to use it
- Roles / Team – Documenting who is qualified and will do each part of the plan
Next, we list some of the key digital marketing and sales tasks broken into stages.
Attracting Prospects
- Who we are targeting and why — We list key personas, such as business owner Barbara, marketing Mark, etc.
- Develop a buyer’s journey map, so we understand the many searches and steps customers take on their path to purchase
- Your message and unique selling proposition (USP) — Explain why customers should buy from you versus the competition
- Specific tactics that you have chosen to engage us on and the essentials of what we are doing there, such as:
- Branding
- SEO
- Content Marketing
- PPC & Paid Advertising
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Email and Marketing Automation
- Online Public Relations
- Social Media
- Referrals helped by online tactics
- Design
- Development
Converting Prospects
- What calls to action will we use to get calls and leads? Examples include: unique web phone numbers, live chat, ebook downloads, contact forms for those who know what they want and those who do not, ‘buy now’ buttons, and more.
- Do we have content for each stage of the marketing funnel such as awareness, consideration, decision? Examples include Ebooks/white papers, case studies and contact forms.
Closing Prospects
- How we will nurture our leads? Utilize HubSpot, Marketo, or Infusionsoft marketing automation.
- What is our Sales Conversion Strategy?
Delighting Customers
- How we will WOW our customers and stimulate referrals?
Why people work with us and follow our system
We’re not interested in churning and burning clients like so many agencies trying to grow at an accelerated rate.
The McDougall family has been in marketing since 1970, and we have a reputation to live up to. The following video testimonial from Stephen Immerman, PhD, hopefully illustrates the level of commitment we make to each client:
Our customers also frequently compliment us on our knowledge and overall helpfulness.
How to start working with us
If you want a free consultation, either pick up the phone and ask for John McDougall at 978-750-8000, send us an email, or fill out our free strategy session form.
However you contact us, we’re happy to discuss what you’re up to and see if there might be a fit and a way we can really help you.
If you’re not ready to get started right away, feel free to browse our resources and our blog.
Google Adwords
Certified Partner
IAC Award
Winner
Market Motive
Certified Partner
HubSpot
Certified Partner
