Digital Marketing Roadmap Summary

Digital marketing is interconnected and your strategy is only as strong as the weakest link. For sure you may be doing great things on some parts but if it’s not joined up properly then you will leak prospects through the holes you have left. This article is all about helping you think through the different aspects that you do need to get right in your digital marketing roadmap.

If after reading this article you feel a little overwhelmed then we can help you develop your own digital marketing roadmap with our free 1.5-hour digital marketing review at our Salford offices or via phone or Skype if not convenient.

Digital Marketing Management

Digital marketing management is about setting the goals in your business’s digital marketing roadmap and identifying how you are going to meet your goals.

Our view is that you should set your goals for the year and then break them down into quarterly objectives that will help move you closer to those goals.

There is an ongoing project management role to measure progress against those objectives. If you are not achieving those objectives then you need to reassess and decide whether there is a smarter way to achieve those objectives or whether what you are trying to do make sense. You need to fail fast those projects that are going nowhere and stick with those that are.

Action

• Sit down with your team and agree on what you want to achieve for your business in the next 12 months and what objectives you need to agree on in order to develop your digital marketing.
• Stop doing things that don’t take you a step nearer to your goals.

Digital Marketing Action Planning

“A goal without a plan is just a wish” as the famous quote says. Once you have decided what you want to achieve then you need to agree on an action plan. Sit down with your team and create a one-page plan with key tasks and objectives. Agree on who will be responsible for completing tasks and by when.

Action

• Sit down with your team and agree on the tasks that you need to do in order to achieve your goals. We use a simple one-page plan which we use when we work with clients.
• Simply write down your objectives at the top and then create a list of digital marketing categories down the left-hand side and then next to each one what you are going to do in the next 90 days. Then make sure you do them!

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a crucial part of your digital marketing roadmap. Buyers today whether selling to businesses or consumers want to be educated or entertained. They are either searching for solutions to problems or something that meets their desires. Fundamentally, your digital marketing is about providing answers to their questions on their journey to find a solution.

Your content needs to demonstrate your knowledge & expertise. Your content needs to help your buyers down the “know, like, trust” pathway to help them to become a customer.

Action

Agree on a content plan. Plan to write an expert article at least once per month. Ideally, it should be more like once a week.

Website & Ecommerce Development

Your website is your space on the Internet to hold information that your buyers can use to determine whether they will buy from you or not. It’s your digital shop window to the world and it needs to reflect what you do.

A website needs to be organic. Your business and your market doesn’t stop still and neither should your website.

Have a plan in place to ensure you are creating regular content whether that is written, images or video.

Unless you are a national brand then your site needs to be about promoting your expertise and making it easy for your customers to buy from you.

We are buying more and more products and services online. Are there any of your products or services that could be sold directly online?

Action

• Review your website.
• Can a visitor find all the information they need about your products and services?
• Can they see that you are an expert in your field?
• What do you do to capture a potential prospects email address?
• Does it work as well on a mobile and tablet as it does on a desktop?
• What are your key calls to action and are they prominent?

Social Media Management

Social media is often used to do the initial research into a company either by checking out what they are currently saying or by asking their friends or increasingly getting feedback in groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.

At the moment, there is a belief that if you are selling to consumers you need to be on Facebook and Instagram and if selling to other businesses then you need to be on LinkedIn. Those lines are becoming blurry and so it’s about experimentation and if you are producing content for one platform then there is no reason why you can’t share it on other platforms.

Google has been rolling out Google for Business which will play a greater role in your digital presence as Google try to force every business to have a business listing on Google. To see yours, type in your company name and the town you are in. A panel should appear on the right-hand side with your details (or not as the case may be).

Action

• Review what you are doing on social media. Find out what’s working and what isn’t.
• Check you can access your details on Google for Business and look to create a couple of posts and make sure your details are up to date.
• With the main social media platforms, the ideal at the moment is if you can publish a post per day. Review what you are doing.

Educate, Entertain and Inform

One of the overall goals of your Digital Marketing Roadmaps should be to inform and educate your target audience. Generally, people search on Google and social media for three things in the main; to be educated, informed or entertained. For most businesses, this means educating the reader on how their products and services can support them to solve a problem or meet their desire.

Action

• How does your digital marketing communicate your expertise and leadership in your field?
• How do you ensure your messages are getting to where your customers are?

LinkedIn Lead Generation

With GDPR and the changes in the way we collect information on potential purchases, if you or somebody on the team is not active on LinkedIn then you are potentially missing out on business. Through conversational marketing and social selling more people are networking and building relationships on LinkedIn. For some, with some automation & conversational marketing, LinkedIn can be a powerful lead generation tool.

Action

• If you are selling to other businesses then you or somebody on your team need to be actively managing your presence on LinkedIn & generating leads.
• Review where you are up to and put in place an action plan to exploit it more.

Email Marketing & Personalised Messages

Once somebody has found you and you have become a potential supplier to them you need to capture their details so that you can help them select you as a supplier.

The goal for you is to build an audience of potential prospects and currently the only practical way to do this for most businesses is a GDPR compliant email database in a package like MailChimp or similar email marketing system.

You need to make an offer that somebody will exchange their email for such as a free review, survey, benchmarking exercise or free quotation or visit depending what is appropriate to you and your customer.

When you send out the emails have you used the personalisation tools in the email marketing system?

Action

• Review whether you are collecting email addresses in a GDPR compliant way and, if you are, how you are using those emails to communicate with your customers and prospects.
• If you haven’t already done so, instigate a monthly newsletter to your prospects and customers.

Marketing Automation

The drive to self-service continues unabated. We are now looking at systems that capture an enquirers email address and then depending on what the visitor has asked about they are provided answers based on a previously compiled frequently asked questions (FAQ). This means your business can be answering questions whilst you get on with running your business.

Customers and prospects alike love freebies. What item of value can you offer that helps them but is low cost to you? Whether you are selling a product or service it is important that you are able to offer enticements to encourage them to get to know you and trust you so that they will do business with you.

Action

• Compile a list of frequently asked questions that your prospects and customers regularly enquire about. Initially, you can post these on your blog.
• Once you have compiled the majority, we can sit down with you and introduce you to low-cost software that you can put on your website and where the software will answer visitor questions on your behalf.

Digital Marketing Analysis & Reporting

As the saying goes, “what gets measured gets done”. There are a lot of subtleties in digital marketing and once you have the basics in place it’s a case of analysing the vast amounts of metrics available to you to identify what’s working and what isn’t. The reporting from the analysis should be used to trigger further actions to improve the performance of the various aspects of your digital marketing roadmap.

This analysis becomes critical when Google or Social Media platforms change how they do things and sometimes these changes can be quite dramatic. What may have worked one day may not work the next.

Action

• As a minimum, you should have access to your Google Analytics (ask your web designer) if you don’t.
• The social media you use will also have a range of metrics you can look at.
• For more information, read:  How do you know your digital marketing is working?
• Read our article on how to use the free version of Dasheroo to measure your digital marketing: How do I measure the performance of my digital marketing using Dasheroo?

More Information on your digital marketing roadmap

For more information on the latest in Digital Marketing, please go to, 2019 Digital Marketing Strategy that will keep you ahead of the competition

If you need a professional marketing company to steer your business in the right direction, get in touch with KUB today on 0345 053 7417 to see how our services will get you to the top. Alternatively, message us through the icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.