Marketing in this day and age can get cluttered fast. Like a kitchen cupboard full of appliances, things can often get added to your digital marketing strategy without an eye on long-term need or how it fits within the larger organization. Over time, the whole thing can feel like a mess, with some people in the organization wondering how a marketing tool got mixed in there and why someone wanted to have it in the first place.

The solution? Take everything out of the cupboard, and then put back only what you need in a highly logical and organized fashion. This method of completely overhauling your digital marketing strategy can have tremendous benefits for workflow, establishing goals, getting rid of unneeded chaff and helping your teams feel more focused overall.

Here is how to get started:

Define Your Key Assets and How Marketing Can Benefit Them

As a business, you have several key assets that you aim to provide some sort of benefit for through marketing. Your business name and logo, for instance, should be recognizable, so marketing can aim to improve brand recognition. Your brand values and company philosophy help separate you from competitors, so marketing helps make these factors seem important while improving brand affinity.

Regarding concrete assets like products, services or a unique process, marketing aims to improve sales revenue while promoting each aspect as integral to customer needs, not just a commodity.

In this way, you can inventory everything important about your company and review how marketing can help your company promote them to be more effective, appealing and memorable.

Set Concrete Goals for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Once you have forged a direct connection between your most critical assets and how marketing can affect them, you can begin to forge concrete digital marketing goals. For instance, marketing for the sake of a product can help your company achieve 10,000 units of sales in a quarter while obtaining more than 33 percent of regional market share.

The hard numbers behind your goals will shift over time, but it is critical to establish metrics that are key performance indicators for your marketing success. Too many businesses make assumptions about what marketing activities they should engage in based on what others are doing. Instead, you should always focus on yourself and your unique goals first, only adding on marketing tactics, campaigns and channels once you understand how they will help you meet those goals.

Determine the Marketing Activities and Resources That Can Help You Reach Your Goals

This is the step where you start putting things back into the cupboard. Once you more clearly understand your marketing goals and how they help your company boost existing assets, you can pinpoint the most effective marketing activities to reach your goals.

Resources and activities can include:

During this stage, you should make efforts to research the general consensus on certain marketing activities to decide if they are right for you, opening your options to new possibilities you had not considered and helping you reject practices considered largely outdated or ineffective.

Design a Marketing Architecture Where Each Action and Asset Helps You Reach Your Goal and/or Reinforces Other Resources

The above three steps may seem basic, but they are a bit of necessary housekeeping to reach this step: mapping it all out. Through a well-organized document and perhaps even accompanying visual aids, you company can chart exactly which resources and activities will lead most directly to your marketing goals.

Thinking about the customer journey path can also help with this stage of organization. For instance, if your goal is to boost sales, then a sample customer journey might be:

Someone sees a Facebook ad for a free gift promotion ⇒ They visit a landing page and enter their email ⇒ They receive a “thank you” email giving them instructions on claiming their free gift and a limited-time offer ⇒ They use their promotional code to purchase items at a discount using their offer, which will be shipped with their free gift ⇒ A follow-up email tells them about a product or service they may also be interested in ⇒ They bookmark a product page for later, and come back after their next payday to purchase it and other items.

This path is mildly convoluted, but it only involves a few things: social media, landing pages, email, an ecommerce website and the right promotions at the right time. In this way, the chosen marketing resources all pull multiple duties while serving to bring about a final goal. KPIs can be measured during the process to determine optimal conversions from one step to the next. Unneeded things, like influencer campaigns, are ruled out of the equation because they provide no benefit.

Document Your Digital Marketing Strategy, Including Typical Processes and Policies

Once you have a marketing ecosystem in mind, you can document the business assets that are prioritized, the marketing resources you will use to reinforce them, the typical audience segments you intend to target, some sample customer journeys and a process for measuring the effectiveness of each marketing activity.

In the end, everything has a purpose and a place, and every employee has clear instructions and expectations to follow.

Contact us to begin architecting your digital marketing strategy and putting it into action.