For companies that limited in house resources and/or no defined digital marketing strategy, Guidant offers our full service outsourced digital marketing department service. This is an end to end service in which Guidant functions as your marketing department. We define strategy, test and measure tactics, provide reporting, and act as an extension of your company with your agency vendors and/or internal staff. This service is perfect for growing companies that want to aggressively leverage one or several digital marketing strategies but don’t have the resources internally to do it effectively.
Outsourced Digital Marketing Department
The process that Guidant uses to develop your digital strategy is tailored to each client. Some businesses already have strong traffic and an active customer base. Even if this is the case we feel that it is important to touch on all stages of the process in order to have success with the development of a plan.
Background
Our process starts with determining where are you now? If you don’t know where you’ve been it is difficult to figure out where your going. At the very least we complete a simple Digital Marketing Audit of your current and past tactics.
- Customers & Personas – Gain insights into who are your customers, why they buy, and what is the typical path to purchase (the same applies with lead generation).
- Competitor Analysis – Identifying known and unknown competitors, understanding what they are doing well, and then exploring your company’s strengths and weaknesses compared to them.
- Partners – Are your partners providing value and are they worth maintaining? This may include affiliates, influencers, links, directories and comparison sites, an syndication partners.
- Competencies – We take a deep look at your internal capabilities and technology resources.
- Performance/Results – Review the KPI’s and compare them to past results while also getting a detailed picture of the marketing and conversion funnel(s)
- Market Trends – Every industry has it’s own market trends so we work with you to develop an understanding of opportunities and threats that may exist in the future.
Determine Objectives
What do you want to achieve as a company? This question is typically answered with common KPI’s such as revenue, margin, and market share, but should also consider the company mission and vision.
The Mission Statement states the reason that you company exists. It defines the company’s purpose and should connect your employees to your customers and possibly offers a value statement.“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
A Vision Statement is more focused around your company whereas the Mission Statement is focuses on the market. Where do you see the company going? What do you plan to achieve? Vision statements may be transformational, they may be quantitative or qualitative. Microsoft famously had the following: “A computer on every desk and in every home; all running Microsoft software.”
Key Performance Indicators are used to set standards of performance and help define progress towards larger organization goals.
- Primary Objectives: ROI, Sales, Market Share, Sentiment, Awareness
- Secondary Objectives: Visits, Conversion Rates, Subscribers/Customers, Leads, Orders, Cost per Lead, etc.
- User Objectives: Page Views, Search Phrases, Top Content, likes, etc.
Strategy Development
How do you get there? The strategy developed will drive tactics so it is important to be very specific with your target markets and positioning. From there we can develop a engagement and customer strategies which takes those prospects all the way through the buying process and even the post buying process.
- Target Markets – this is essential as it determines “who” will be targeted
- Objectives – strategy must be aligned with the objectives that you set
- Positioning –
- Processes
- Partnership – are there potential partners whose customers would benefit from your products or services?
- Sequence – are you new and need awareness or established and need to fill your funnel
- Integration – CRM, first party data, third party data, social data
- Tactical Tools – the channels that will be used to achieve your objectives
- Engagement – how to push visitors through your funnel
Choose Tactics
Most companies think that they have a digital marketing strategy because they are using one or several different ‘tactics”. When we develop a strategy we work to identify the best tactics that will be implemented to achieve your objectives. The tactics are driven by the objectives. For example, if your goal is to retain more customers or bring back old customers, the focus might be on email and CRO. Other tactics are better for filling your sales funnel.
- SEO – Search Engine Optimization
- PPC – Paid Search
- Display Advertising & Retargeting
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing & Newsletters
- Affiliate
- Chat
- Social Media
- Webinars
- CRO- Conversation Rate Optimization
- Web Design
The goal when identifying tactics is to find the right mix that will achieve your objectives and our expertise using these tactics helps companies avoid spending time or money on tactics that don’t lead towards reaching your objectives.
Implementation Plan
- Who – In the Situational Analysis, we identified the resources.This helps us guide the action plan in order to determine who is available to execute tactics within your company. It may also let us know that new agency partners need to be sourced. The action plan will outline who who will work on the strategy and outline their role. it will also guide both internal and external communication.
- When – There may be several stages to any strategy so the plan will outline when certain tactics will be imitated and the flight dates for any advertising campaigns.
- Budget – We always strive to set the action plan based on your budget. In cases where budget is not defined we make recommendations. It is highly recommended that all companies have an ongoing test budget in order to integrate new tactics on a test basis that may be outside the initial budget for the primary tactics.
Measurement
- KPI’s – What will be measured?
- Responsibility – Who will handle measurement?
- Frequency – How often will measurements occur?
- Actions when objectives are not being met or are above targets
- Does your website perform properly?
- Are you getting the right visitors?
- Usability Testing
- Are visitors satisfied – survey
- Conversion Optimization
- Multi-channel funnel analysis