Why do you need a digital marketing blueprint?

Because a vision without a strategy remains an illusionDigital Strategy is an integral part of our service offering as it provides the blueprint for cost-effectively achieving your marketing goals and ultimately your vision.  Let’s say, your business objective is to grow revenue by 20%, you will then need to put together a strategy that will achieve outcomes that make that goal possible.  Alternatively, your objective may be to build brand awareness, introduce a new product to market or conduct some online research for your mainstream marketing efforts. These are all perfectly valid for an online marketing campaign but the tactics used to achieve each of these objectives may be different so you need to have a solid strategy before you begin. At WSI, we are big believers in a “strategy first” approach so we’ve put together the Digital Marketing Blueprint Programme to help companies develop a strategy to deliver on their marketing goals.  It’s a tried and tested repeatable process that is executed over a short timeframe with great results.

The Digital Marketing Blueprint approach addresses questions like: 

1. Where are your competitors advertising online and how much they are investing?

2. Which investments are the most effective?

3. Who is buying from your competitor?With our global research team and powerful marketing technology, we can answer these questions and many more. We analyze your web-presence, make suggestions for improvement, and most importantly, provide a series of strategic marketing tactics that are designed to work with each other.  Based on the data we have gathered during our process we will put together a set of recommendations that will help you reach your online marketing goals.  The role of each tactic will be clearly explained, including the strategic advantages, how it fits into the actual strategy, and sensible advertising budget recommendations that support your financial metrics and fit within your budget constraints. Rather than trying to start everything at once, we will help you put together a plan with a realistic timeline for rolling out each new initiative.  With this programme, WSI removes the guesswork and uncertainty from marketing investments by allowing real-world data to guide our decisions.

What is the Digital Marketing Blueprint Programme exactly? It’s a 5 Step Process that starts with an understanding of your growth and revenue goals and ends with a clear actionable plan for delivering results.

Step1: Buyer PersonaThe first step is defining your buyer persona – The persona is essentially a fictitious representation of your customer.  It’s impossible to put a successful marketing campaign together if we don’t know who it is that we’re directing our marketing at! This is a collaborative exercise between your team and ours to understand who that target market is, what keeps them awake at night, what they’re interested in, what they’re not interested in and ultimately what your company’s differentiators are so these unique selling points can be included in your marketing messages. You may think you know who your ideal customer is but do you have it down in writing and can everyone on your team identify them…by name?

Step 2: Market Research The second step is market research.  At this stage of the project we’ll determine the demand for your product or service.  What are people searching for on Google, what does the monthly search volume look like and is your brand appearing in the search results?

Step 3: Competitor AnalysisThe third step is around Competitor Analysis.  Like it or not you most likely have a competitor – even if you are in a super specialised niche. The programme includes a full SWOT analysis of your competition to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that might influence our proposed plan.  This analysis is a great opportunity to see how your company measures up in your market – to observe what your competitors are doing well online and avoid what they’re doing badly!

Step 4: Technical AnalysisThe fourth step is a technical deep dive into your website.

1. What’s the user experience like?

2. Is the website doing its job?

3. What does your content inventory look like?We’ll identify areas of improvement and make recommendations on what needs to be fixed.

Step 5: The Digital Marketing Funnel Blueprint Delivered The final step is the critical step where we pull all of this analysis together into a strategy and a road map for your business which can be implemented in a realistic marketing plan based around your budget.

Still wondering if a Digital Marketing Blueprint is a good fit for your business? When it comes to the Blueprint we typically see three types of scenarios:

1. You have a marketing team but you’re lacking a strategy… You want to take control over your own marketing, but you don’t know where to begin? Maybe you had a false start or two, and you can’t afford another? If you’ve got the people…we’ve got the plan. If your business is equipped to take our digital blueprint and execute it in-house, we say go for it! We’ll be waiting for you at the finish line with the results and the next 90-day plan. Our Digital Marketing Blueprint service is perfect for businesses that have the marketing resources to manage their own marketing, but just need some guidance.  We help you build out the strategy and your team (or a third party provider) does the implementation.

2. You need help with a strategy AND need to skill up your team. This model is becoming more common where we help with the implementation of the strategy but we also transfer the skills to your staff so they can manage the ongoing digital marketing plan. If you are struggling with resources, we can continue to offer support and guidance post implementation.  We make sure the marketing results stay on track and you can leverage our team of experts for the complicated things that you can’t or don’t want to do.

3. You don’t have the time or resources … You just want the results.We hear a lot of companies say that they don’t want to invest in hiring a digital marketing resource because it’s so hard to keep them upskilled in the latest digital marketing tactics.  There is no doubt that this is one of the challenges in our industry. As a global digital marketing agency, continuous learning is a key part of our company culture and we invest heavily in education to keep our staff ahead of current trends. For many companies, it’s more efficient to simply outsource your digital marketing than keep an in-house team.  For the cost of a single marketing salary, you’ll get a whole team of experienced professionals dedicated to your company’s success. If this describes your scenario, we are ready to take on the heavy lifting and get you the results you are looking for! We definitely see ourselves as your partner rather than a supplier and will work closely with your management team as your outsourced marketing department.

What happens after the Digital Marketing Blueprint and what are 90 Day Bursts? Be assured, we don’t just do a data dump and leave you hanging!  Our roadmap provides a veryprovides very clear direction on how to get started.  Rather than preparing a long term plan that is expensive to implement and takes what seems like an eternity to get results, we like to focus on short attainable sprints. We love 90 day programmes as they are typically long enough to get results but short enough to keep your team focused on the challenge and be confident in the ability of the programme to deliver results. Contact us for more information today.