Hi, I’m Alexandra King - but you can call me Ali!
Around 15 years ago, I began my marketing career in the B2C world, creating and executing digital marketing campaigns, brand collateral and events for some of the world’s leading tech brands including Samsung, Sony, Microsoft and Beats by Dre. I’ve since held positions including Head of Marketing & Digital Business Manager at sports fashion brands such as Reebok and Lacoste.
I am proud of the work I accomplished there, but those years also had a profound influence on the skills I learned which I draw from today. In fact, this period in my career showed me how powerful B2C marketing can be, especially when brought to the B2B space.
So today, I gladly offer the experience and expertise I gathered throughout that time in consumer land to the B2B and SME landscape with Ask Marketing, where my team and I combine decisive digital strategy and managed marketing execution to help B2B & service businesses build demand, establish thought leadership and own their industry.
Now, I have a couple of questions for you:
- Do you want to create a well-known and respected brand?
- Are you aware of the steps that go into creating one?
- How strong do you feel your digital presence is currently?
The reality is: in this fast-paced and ever-changing digital world, understanding the importance of and then implementing a powerful digital marketing strategy is vital for every business.
Let’s explore everything you need to know about digital strategies today.
Table of Contents
STEP 1: What is a digital marketing strategy?
STEP 2: Who should build a digital marketing strategy?
STEP 3: When is the right time to develop a digital strategy?
STEP 5: The biggest predicted B2B marketing trends in 2024?
STEP 6: Let’s introduce our example business
STEP 7: Ask Marketing’s steps to building a great Digital Marketing Strategy
STEP 1: What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is an overarching roadmap that outlines the actions a business needs to take to achieve its digital marketing goals.
Based on factors like business objectives, vision statements, customer personas and budget, a digital marketing strategy highlights the building blocks needed to drive the business towards achieving those set goals.
For more information, read: What is a Digital Marketing Strategy and Does Your Business Need One?
STEP 2: Who should build a digital marketing strategy?
Global marketing trends, together with the challenges they bring, highlight the essential reasons why the development of a digital strategy must be devised and implemented by an experienced senior marketing leader.
Similarly, common internal problems like:
- the marketing function being siloed
- internal junior teams lacking strategy expertise and leadership, and
- the need for visibility and control
have also resulted in business leaders calling for a digital marketing strategy they can trust.
In my experience, having developed digital marketing strategies whilst working both internally within a business, and now as a fractional CMO through Ask Marketing, I believe that:
Who develops a digital strategy is LESS about where the marketing strategist is positioned in the business, and now MORE about their comprehensive understanding of the commercial goals of the business from a senior leadership perspective.
That’s why strategic marketing plans need to be built by experts who can not only ensure true alignment with the overarching business goals but who also possess a deep understanding of the current marketing landscape, the relevant technologies and tools, as well as how to best resource the roadmap to achieve results.
To learn more, see: What Comes First in Digital Marketing: The People or The Plan?
STEP 3: When is the right time to develop a digital strategy?
Digital matters now more than ever. Marketing has become a revenue-driving business function, and thanks to major technological advancements, its significance knows no geographical or cultural bounds. Businesses large and small can now get online to infiltrate and attract any market at any place and time, using smart digital strategies.
With 5.3 billion people online daily, brands now have the opportunity to connect with over 65% of the global population.
The global pandemic from 2020 onwards has abruptly accelerated the need for many businesses to rethink their activities, budgets, digital presence and bottom line.
With humanity more digitally connected than ever, digital marketing has never been so important.
So in a nutshell, the right time to develop a digital marketing strategy was yesterday.
If your business isn’t prioritising its digital presence and capabilities, you’re already falling behind.
A digital marketing strategy builds the foundation of your marketing function, helping to accelerate your company's online presence and increase leads, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and overall business efficiency.
In other words, it is the first step towards growth for modern businesses.
STEP 4: What are the 4 key elements a great digital marketing strategy will dictate for your business?
A great digital marketing strategy includes both the strategy itself, as well as the best approach on how to execute it effectively.
As a business leader, it’s important to understand all of the key components of a comprehensive digital strategy, which you’ll find outlined below. I am going to go into detail below about the key components of a digital strategy, but as a business leader, it is important to, first and foremost, understand what this strategy will influence.
1. Demand Generation
Many businesses believe that if they can just increase their leads, they can make more sales and increase their bottom line.
However, lead generation relies far too heavily on the current existence of demand.
Therefore, the smarter option is to shift your thinking towards demand generation. Because demand doesn’t happen on its own - you need to create it for yourself.
This mindset shift really began to take hold in 2023, and I’ve personally seen demand generation marketing have a huge impact on several businesses we work with since.
Essentially, a great digital marketing strategy will take a proactive approach, focusing on demand generation methodology to build more qualified leads, support the sales process and deliver real attributable business revenue.
2. Resourcing needs
A digital strategy should provide an objective recommendation about the best approach for execution, based on the channels and tactics within the strategy. This includes:
- recruitment of an internal marketing team, or appropriate delegation to existing internal marketers
- engagement with any specific digital agencies
- opting for a blended approach using a combination of both of the above
3. Content needs
Being the backbone of all marketing, the digital strategy must outline all content marketing requirements in order to be able to execute the marketing. For instance, it’s important to explore what content needs to be created, for what purpose or objective, for which channel, on what timeline and with what budget.
For more, read: Content Marketing Plan with The Exact Pieces of Content to Create.
4. Technology needs
Without technology, the content that forms the strategy cannot be developed, hosted or measured. A clear plan for marketing technology, including the use of AI to bolster sales and marketing, must be included to simplify processes, measure the impact of marketing activities and drive efficient spending.
Now, it’s time to put all of this into practice.
Every business’ digital strategy can vary, depending on many factors.
At Ask Marketing, we’ve worked with hundreds of businesses, small and large, to develop their digital marketing strategies. Each business that approaches us has varying levels of maturity and a different technology stack that requires different tactics, channels, budgets and more.
So, to keep this practical, let’s introduce a hypothetical company (below) and dive into these key components required to create and implement an effective Digital Marketing Strategy.
But before we begin
STEP 5: What are the biggest predicted B2B marketing trends in 2024?
A huge part of a successful digital marketing strategy is staying on top of the latest marketing trends and taking the time to implement these, where relevant, into your own strategy.
To help give you a head start for the year ahead, here are the biggest predicted B2B marketing trends in 2024:
- More businesses will take advantage of the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with the main AI tools in our arena being used for personalised prospecting at scale, video and voice messaging at scale, and the use of multilingual video conversion at scale.
- We’ll see a rise in the number of intimate educational, face-to-face events designed to support digital brand awareness
- Digital marketing will lean even more heavily into video marketing, especially short-form videos which are proving the most effective this year
- Longer-form written content (like this very guide) is on the rise for both SEO and customer perspectives as they offer a far greater depth and breadth of knowledge
- We’re also already seeing search engines like Google start to promote sites that provide more than just “superficial knowledge” of their space
- Businesses will place a strong focus on strengthening the middle and bottom of their funnel through aligned sales and marketing people, content, tools and metrics
- We’ll see far more automation being implemented to speed up time-consuming tasks
- Brands and their content will become more authentic than ever before, in line with audience expectations
- Businesses will place a greater emphasis on making data-backed decisions using metrics that align the sales and marketing functions
- It will be advantageous to keep your marketing strategy flexible and review it regularly to adapt to evolving needs and expectations
STEP 6: Let’s introduce our example business for digital strategy implementation
To help you understand how to build an effective digital strategy, I’ve created a fictitious business which represents many of those who come to Ask Marketing for assistance in creating and implementing their own strategies.
Through this hypothetical case study, you’ll learn more about how a digital marketing strategy can strengthen your organisation’s performance and productivity overall.
Name: Blue Sky Finance
Industry: Financial services company
Offering: B2B Service based business
Age: 5 years old
Revenue: $6 million per annum
Current situation: Over the past 12-24 months, the company has experienced a great amount of change and has re-invented their core service offering. They have experienced a lot of organic growth and are now ready to solidify their commercial goals based on this new focus, develop a new brand and marketing strategy, and amplify their acquisition volume of new clients.Current Marketing: Until this point, the company has approached marketing in a reactive rather than a proactive way.
Current Challenges:
- A junior marketer is helping with the day-to-day executions, but the senior leadership team has to come up with the overall marketing direction, which is not their strong point.
- The company lacks the skill set of strategic marketing direction and is unsure of the best execution methods to assist in this growth phase.
- No marketing systems in place
- Marketing and sales functions siloed
- Unsure how to leverage AI in marketing and sales functions
Marketing Team:
- 1 junior social media marketer
- EA who helps with marketing when needed
Objective: To support their growth trajectory, the company is at a point where they need help to determine how best to set up the marketing function for long-term success.
The critical first step to this involves building a robust, customised digital strategy that is based on their 2024 commercial business goals and focus areas. This needs to be built by someone with the right experience and expertise to effectively lead this project.
So, below, I will demonstrate the below concepts and explanations using this case study, above. Let’s begin!
STEP 7: Ask Marketing’s 9 steps to building a great Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Understand that marketing doesn’t start with marketing
The reality is that marketing starts at the leadership table and must be based on core commercial goals.
Before formulating a path towards success, we first need to know the final destination. This allows your organisation to build a roadmap in a relevant direction.
The driving forces behind digital marketing strategies are the company goals. They are essentially the reason why we recommend the actions we do. The brand must establish both long-term and short-term goals, with qualitative and quantitative milestones or checkpoints along the way.
In the marketing world, you will often hear the terms “goal”, strategy”, “channels” and “tactics” used interchangeably when referring to marketing objectives. However, they are not all the same thing and it’s important to understand what they are, how they are different from one another, when each is relevant and in what context:
- The digital marketing strategy refers to the overarching plan required to achieve a business goal or goals. The strategy cannot be created until the business goals are determined.
- Channels are the marketing methods or platforms that are used to market through.
- Tactics are the specific actions taken to execute and support the strategy using the required channels.
Let's put this into practice.
Blue Sky Finance - Qualitative and Quantitative goals
To learn more about this approach that I use, read my article: 3 Metrics to Prove Your Sales and Marketing Are Working Synergistically.
2. Pick your fish ‘before casting your rod’
This is where you take the time to get extremely clear on and understand your Target Market and define your priority Customer Personas.
You’ve all heard the saying, “there are plenty of fish in the sea”. But why go chasing salmon when your brand needs to catch a shark?
The same applies to your business and determining what kind of customer you want to “land”. Customer personas help you do this by allowing you to understand and then target, convert and retain them.
Customer personas form the backbone of all digital marketing activity. They will be referred to in pretty much every digital marketing scenario to continuously ensure that a proposed idea, like a specific digital marketing campaign, will be aligned with the relevant persona.
The most accurate customer personas are based on primary market research gathered from your actual customer base via questionnaires, interviews, feedback surveys and so on. They can also be supported by third-party insights found online, as well as studies conducted by other organisations.
TIP: Target market research that supports customer personas needs to be done prior to digital strategy development. Then, the role of the digital strategy is to consolidate this information into succinct customer personas, so that you can identify the precise channels and tactics required to communicate with them.
Questions to ask to build a customer persona
After conducting hundreds of these interviews over the past 10 years, these are my favourite questions to ask my clients. It’s incredible what you find out when you approach this with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective:
- Where do you live?
- What is your company?
- What age bracket are you in?
- What was the initial need you were seeking prior to considering partnering with X?
- When did the partnership with X kick-off?
- What has the process/journey with X been like?
- What were your top values/non-negotiables when undergoing the decision-making process?
- Do you remember referring to the website at any point in your decision-making process? If so, which parts?
- Can you remember how many touchpoints you had with X during the decision-making process?
- How would you describe the X service offering and brand to a family member or friend?
- What social channels do you personally spend the most time on?
- What type of content do you interact with the most?
In other words, if you don’t understand your ideal customer segments, it’s hard to develop a strategy to reach and convert them.
For Blue Sky Finance, this is just one persona. Often businesses have around two or three different personas, depending on their products, services and industry.
3. Know who you are and own it
Now it’s time to confirm your key Brand Marketing Components.
Brand marketing is the overarching story that represents a brand or business: who they are, what they do, their vision or purpose and the messaging they use to convey this to the market.
Digital marketing allows brands to spread their message far and wide, and tell their brand story to make an impression on their target customers. That’s why it’s imperative that the digital strategy is executed with continual and consistent brand messaging that is strong, clear and in true alignment with the business’ operations in order for digital marketing to be successful.
TIP: Before engaging someone to help with your digital marketing strategy, you must have the following brand marketing components finalised and ready to share:
Effective brand marketing is consistent but adaptive.
The most successful brand marketing strategies are those that can shift in the name of relevance, depending on important influences like trends and fluctuations.
A great example of this is Airbnb. In 2020, Airbnb shifted its business strategy to domestic travel to meet the needs of the market in line with a global pandemic. In alignment with launching this new strategy came new brand messaging which included the strapline “Go near”. By launching this new brand messaging together with their new business focus, their digital marketing message was not only clear and concise, but it was also incredibly relevant. As a result, it served Airbnb well and helped them during what would have otherwise been a highly disruptive time for their industry.
The bottom line is, that if your brand’s marketing isn't clear, concise and consistent across all digital platforms, the result will heavily impact your brand recognition and Return On Investment (ROI).
Let's put this into practice.
Blue Sky Finance: Brand Marketing
The critical brand marketing components Blue Sky Finance needs to ensure successful digital marketing strategy development include:
Service Vision (inward-facing): We provide financial services to a broad range of private individuals, investors and businesses. We offer exceptional guidance on how to manage money, including investment options, mortgages, stocks, credit, equity options and more to enhance the financial standing of our entire community.
Strapline (public-facing): Investing made easy
USP (public-facing): Achieve financial freedom through transparent, customised and quality investment advice.
Core Values (inward-facing):
Brand Guidelines: Blue Sky Finance developed a brand guidelines document that included logos, typography, primary and secondary colours, brand imagery, tone of voice and a guide to each of their applications.
4. Quantify the effectiveness of your sales journey
Let’s explore the Relationship between Sales and Marketing.
At Ask Marketing, we firmly believe that your Marketing and Sales teams should be so intertwined that there is no clear point at which your Marketing ends and your Sales begins.
Why? Because, ultimately, this makes the sales journey a more seamless process for your prospects along the way.
Think about it: Most B2B transactions take place offline, relying on a key partnership between your Sales and Marketing teams. Your Marketing team is responsible for initiating the sales journey with the client, before your Sales team takes over to convert the prospect and get them over the line.
That’s why it’s so important for your Sales and Marketing teams to be in sync with one another.
If you are a service-based business that relies on a process of nurturing to eventually sign a paying client, here are three metrics you should be using:
- Initial Lead Call > Proposal Sent CVR
- Proposal Sent > Client Won CVR
- Total Leads > Client Won CVR
With these metrics, you can effectively measure the efficacy of the relationship between your Sales and Marketing teams.
For more information, read: Why your sales and marketing teams should merge.
Tools and Tactics for each stage of the Sales and Marketing funnel
When putting together your digital strategy, it’s important to consider the different tools that you might use at the top, the middle and the bottom of your funnel.
To help, here are some of the tools and tactics I employ at different stages.
Let’s put this into practise:
Our sample business above has set the following goals:
- Achieve an Initial lead > proposal CVR of 30% = 6 new proposals sent consistently each month
- Achieve a proposal > client won CVR of 60% = 3 - 4 new signed clients achieved consistently each month
- Achieve a total new leads > client won CVR of 25%
5. Turn strangers into loyal customers
Let’s build your User Funnel and outline all relevant tactics.
Once the digital conversion points are identified, the relevant tactics can be developed within that marketing funnel, across all stages.
Different marketing tactics apply to each corresponding stage according to the strength of the customer’s relationship with your brand. Your tactics are designed to help each customer progress towards the conversion point.
> AWARENESS - Get your message in front of the right eyes
A user searches for or is open to general information.
Awareness is the largest and earliest stage of the marketing funnel and starts the relationship process with your customer and your business. Potential customers are drawn into this stage through targeted marketing executions and strong brand messaging that they resonate with.
Tactics at this level of the funnel can include organic and paid social media campaigns, digital PR activities, strong SEO and Google Ads. It may also include some traditional marketing tactics.
> INTEREST & CONSIDERATION - Make your brand stand out.
The user shows interest, undertakes problem identification and compares options.
Once a potential user is aware of your brand, they may begin to show genuine interest, actively finding out more about the company, its products and services, primarily using your website for this.
At this point, the target customer is interested but not quite ready to buy – perhaps comparing you against the competition or learning more about their options. That’s why websites, social media, Google My Business reviews and other review platforms are vital.
Tactics at this level of the funnel can include things like website chat & Google Reviews.
> REGISTRATION - Turning a user into a lead.
All of the hard work is paying off.
For many businesses, at this stage, the user becomes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) via a digital marketing conversion point by taking a desired action, such as:
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Downloading a piece of content
- Creating a free account
- Requesting a demo
- Completing an enquiry form
- Booking an initial consult
Once the MQL is captured (usually with the help of a CRM tool like Hubspot), depending on the business type, the lead may then be passed onto the sales teams to become a Sales Qualified Lead.
> ACTIVATION - Decrease roadblocks and turn registration into activation.
This is the fun part.
The activation is where the financial transaction takes place, meaning they convert from leads to paying customers.
Examples include that the customer:
- initiates a paid monthly subscription for marketing software (online transaction)
- orders and pays for their Uber Eats delivery (online transaction)
- commences paying for a gym membership via direct debit (online transaction)
- makes their first investment into a wealth management fund (online transaction)
- attends their first tax return appointment with a new accountant and pays for it (offline transaction)
> REACTIVATION - Treat your customers well and they will treat you well.
Now for the best part.
A repeat activation is a sign that the brand has provided an exceptional user experience and level of customer service. Reactivation can single-handedly make or break a business’ bottom line.
Reactivation could be that the customer:
- continues to pay a subscription for an exceptional social scheduling software (online transaction)
- orders and pays for another meal via Uber Eats (online transaction)
- renews and re-commences paying for their gym membership (online transaction)
- continues to invest small amounts into the small wealth management fund (online transaction)
- attends and pays for their second tax appointment (offline transaction)
By reducing customer churn rates (the rate of customers who don’t reactivate), a brand will earn a greater return on investment for their marketing spend.
Further steps of the marketing funnel include advocacy, where the customer goes one step further and actively recommends you to other potential buyers.
Let's put this into practise.
Blue Sky Finance: tactics along the funnel, with the tools we implement for our sample business above.
Top of the funnel:
- ZoomInfo - powerful AI prospecting tool with access to a global B2B database
- Murf.ai - AI voice generator tool for personalised voice messages at scale
- Rask.ai - AI-powered video dubbing tool that translates audio and video into more than 130 languages
- LinkedIn - Professional networking
- Dripify - LinkedIn lead generation
- BOA - Social Media platform for Australian business owners
- Events & Guest Podcasts - Gain exposure and make an impression
Middle of the funnel:
- ActiveCampaign - Automates sales and marketing
- Qwilr - Personalised proposals
- Vouch - Collect client video testimonials and share customer stories
- Voice Memos - Follow up leads with personalised voice notes
Bottom of the funnel:
- Typeform - Create branded forms for feedback, signups and recommendations
- Incentives and Referral Programs - Entice leads with additional incentives
- Personal Catch-ups - Forge more meaningful relationships
6. Deliver relevant, engaging and accessible content
In other words, develop your overarching Content Strategy.
One of modern marketing’s most popular powerhouses today is content.
Marketing content is all of the visual, textual and audible forms of marketing materials that your brand creates to connect with customers, from blogs to explainer videos, and podcasts to news articles.
Without content, we can't execute the majority of the marketing plan, hence why content is a golden nugget at the core of any digital strategy. The bottom line is, that you cannot share your brand's story, value or offering, without readily accessible content.
A content strategy refers to the development of any tangible media that you create and own, whether:
- written (articles, ebooks, research-based white papers, case studies or testimonials)
- visual (images or videos), or
- audio (podcasts) content.
Based on the confirmed strategy, and resultant campaign periods, themes, or focus areas, the content needs to be conceptualised, planned and mapped out into a calendar for the respective team members to then create and publish - whether that be copywriters, graphic designers, videographers, photographers or web developers.
Content strategy for B2B or Service-Based Businesses
For B2B or service-based businesses, it’s now recommended for SEO purposes to create:
- 1 long-form “pillar” content piece of around 3000-5000 words per quarter, and then
- create a few shorter “cluster” pieces of around 1000-1500 words related to this pillar content.
You can then use these pieces to create a variety of short-form content suitable for social media posts, newsletters, explainer videos and so much more.
This new SEO best practice is not dissimilar to what I have referred to in the past as “Big Rock” Methodology, where we would build a substantial piece of content that became a definitive guide to a particular industry conversation that could fuel an “always-on” content strategy for 4-6 months.
Let's put this into practise.
Blue Sky Finance Content: the approach to content
As a service-based business, the ‘Big Rock’ (or cluster/piller SEO) content methodology is perfect for Blue Sky Finance.
The process they followed to develop this was:
- Based on research and analysis, Blue Sky Finance decided on the overarching conversation they wanted to own in their industry.
- They then created the content framework for the pillar, which in this case was a 10-chapter SEO-optimised article, utilising a specialist copywriter paired with a lot of subject matter expertise and credible references
- After this, it was hyper-linked to several related cluster articles to provide further depth to audiences
- They also hosted this article on their CMS Hubspot and website landing page for people to download
- Finally, they carved up the articles into bite-sized pieces, distributed via a content calendar for the rest of the year.
7. Unleash your secret weapon: AI
There are several AI Sales and Marketing tools you can take advantage of as part of your digital strategy.
There are several sophisticated AI platforms and systems that you can use to achieve your marketing and sales objectives.
But don’t stress! I know AI can seem overwhelming at first, but once you understand how AI can help you in your sales and marketing efforts, you’ll be glad you took the time to learn more about it.
AI allows your business to augment your marketing initiatives by creating seamless and smarter strategies targeted at each phase of the marketing funnel: from brand awareness to activation and back again.
It also helps to streamline processes and identifies ways to make your marketing communications as personalised as possible. In a nutshell, AI tools are now essential if you want to remain efficient, profitable, and competitive in today’s competitive and fast-changing business landscape.
For more, read: 5 AI Tools to Strengthen Your Sales and Marketing in 2024.
So, how can you bring AI into your Sales and Marketing funnel?
Well, it’s important to begin by understanding your current technology stack and what tools are currently used for what purpose. This will help to identify any gaps where innovative AI sales and marketing tools could be implemented to achieve both quick wins and longer-term successes.
In our ever-advancing digital world, there is an endless amount of AI tools to choose from, making it feel overwhelming for many businesses.
So, before actively onboarding a new tool, you should assess the value each tool will provide, its specific functions, cost, team access and reliability.
While implementing AI tools can be a time-heavy investment, it will often be one of the best decisions your business will make for long-term efficiencies and scalability.
Learn how AI fits into your business’ digital marketing here.
Let's put this into practise.
Blue Sky Finance: embracing AI Sales and Marketing Solutions
The following AI tools were selected and then implemented for Blue Sky Finance:
- ZoomInfo - A powerful AI prospecting tool that provides you with access to a global B2B contact database.
- Murf.ai - An AI voice generator tool that allows them to create personalised voice messages for clients at scale.
- Rask.ai - An AI-powered video dubbing tool that translates audio and video into more than 130 languages to connect with the overseas market.
- Dripify - An AI-powered prospecting and lead generation tool for networking on LinkedIn.
- ChatGPT - An AI tool useful for assisting copywriters in developing marketing content.
For more sales and marketing tools to supercharge your business, see our article here.
8. Compile your Executional Snapshot
This is your Marketing Activity Summary & Investment Strategy.
It’s time to get into the details to take action. This involves a marketing activity summary, which is a useful and practical consolidation of all marketing tactics recommended in the overarching digital strategy. It’s often summarised in a clear and concise table for the marketing and business teams to be aligned on.
For each individual marketing activity/tactic, the specific details will be outlined:
- The strategic objective
- Timings and frequencies
- Type - “always-on” or campaign-based
- Who is responsible - this may be an internal marketing team member, an agency partner or an expert consultant
- Associated performance metrics - linked to your master data reporting file (we will talk about this below)
- Budget guideline allocated
Let's put this into practise.
Blue Sky Finance: Marketing Activity Statement
Below is an example snapshot of the baseline, organic (free) elements of marketing which are being executed upon month on month, or “always-on”.
This snapshot would be added to with secondary tactics that would require an investment or further external support.
9. Measure your Success
Define your Digital Marketing KPIs and Metrics.
With over 40 different types of marketing and counting, marketers must pull raw data from all platforms and activities into one centralised repository on a regular basis (eg. monthly).
This is what I would call ‘one source of truth’.
Compiling all raw data from each digital marketing activity into one centralised digital marketing master report (eg. built-in Excel or Google Sheets) ensures long-term data security and effective collation over time to build up a bank of historical data that can support the ease of analysing and drawing insights for ongoing future decision making.
Let's put this into practise.
Blue Sky Finance: Pipeline & Marketing Metrics
Each month, topline business marketing marketing metrics are monitored closely, in particular the 3 CVR metrics that we spoke about earlier (these being: lead > proposal CVR, proposal > signed client CVR & total leads > signed clients CVR) that prove that marketing and sales are working together synergistically.
These metrics require input from the sales team which allows transparency across business functions so ensure both teams are working from the same songbook each month.
Then, based on the marketing activities active within the Blue Sky Finance business, individual channel metrics are reported on in the same master reporting document.
For the Blue Sky Finance business, some of their active digital marketing tactics include organic LinkedIn, LinkedIn advertising, Google Search advertising and email marketing, all of which aim to drive traffic to the website.
Each of these activities rely on data from different sources, as below:
Their team pulls the data from each of these platforms and compiles it into a master report, so it becomes a one-stop document containing all the important data and insights across all channels & tactics.
The report contains 1 tab per different marketing activity + a dashboard tab that pulls through a summary of selected critical metrics chosen from each activity that “moves the needle” for the business each month.
These are the metrics the business leadership team looks at monthly.
By maintaining this report and keeping it up to date on a monthly basis, they are able to show a holistic overview of all digital activities, enabling the marketing team and the wider business to speak in the same data language, using the same information to work from.
With this information, they can then proactively observe trends & analyse results to make more informed decisions going forward.
Are you planning to develop your digital marketing strategy? Here’s the sign you’re ASKING for to help you decide!
STEP 8: So, are you prepared to take these steps to implement your own Digital Marketing Strategy in 2024?
If your business wants to establish a successful brand, it all starts by building a strong digital marketing foundation.
So, now you have a list of all the steps you need to take to build your own digital marketing strategy, you may have realised the importance of handing this all over to a highly experienced expert.
So, why not do just that?
This way, you know all of the steps are being handled by a team who know exactly what they’re doing at all times, giving you peace of mind and space to continue to focus on what you do best.
That’s where your digital strategy partners at Ask Marketing come in.
For a powerful digital strategy that drives demand, Ask Marketing can help you.
Here at Ask Marketing, we combine decisive digital strategy and managed marketing execution to help B2B and service businesses build demand, establish thought leadership and own their industry.
Our strategy-first approach serves as the foundation for your entire digital business function. Whether you’re looking to establish, grow or overhaul your marketing, or harness and align your business’ vision and core objectives - we give you the step-by-step roadmap to get you there.
In a nutshell, we build your comprehensive digital strategy, then we can manage the complete rollout and execute it all for you.
So, stop waiting, start building and experience success.
Just get in touch with us and we can discuss your business and the ways we can help you navigate towards your business’ vision with our digital strategy as your compass.
Let’s harness the power of digital marketing today!
For more great marketing content, connect with our company leaders, Alexandra King and Stephanie King, or follow our Ask Marketing LinkedIn page.
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