Digital Strategy
Does your company actively invest in digital strategy and search engine optimization?
(Source: Hubspot Research, Global Survey 2019)
In our experience, successful digital transformation must rest on a foundation of smart digital strategy. And smart digital strategy, like traditional business strategy, is about making wise investment choices to maximize competitive advantage, growth, profit, and value—and then implementing with discipline.
We implement smart Digital Strategy in the following manner:
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Assess the strategic impact of digital
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Setting our digital ambitions high
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Placing big bets
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Build new strategic muscles
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Manage transformation actively
Why is Digital Strategy crucial?
Conversion Rate Optimization
- Only 17% of marketers use landing page A/B tests to improve conversion rates. (HubSpot, 2020)
- The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time. (Portent, 2019)
-In a survey conducted by Databox, 70% of respondents said that SEO is better than PPC for generating sales. (Databox, 2019)
-Landing pages, the least popular type of signup form, have the highest conversion rate (23%).
-On the other hand, popups, the most popular signup form, have the second-lowest conversion rate (3%). (Omnisend, 2018)
Mobile Search
-As of 2019, mobile devices, excluding tablets, generated about half of all website traffic globally. (Statista, 2020)
-Mobile web traffic has consistently accounted for about half of all global web traffic since the beginning of 2017. (Statista, 2020)
-87% of internet users in the U.S. use more than one device when going online. (Think with Google, 2018) 60% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly using the search results (e.g. "click to call" option). (Think with Google, 2019)
-Almost 25% of companies invest in mobile optimization as a top SEO tactic. (HubSpot, 2020)
-39% of smartphone users are more likely to browse or shop a company or brand’s mobile app because it’s easier or faster to make a purchase. (Think with Google, 2019)
(Source: Hubspot,2020)
Local SEO
-Over a two year period, there was a 900%+ growth in mobile searches for “___ near me today/tonight." (Think with Google, 2018)
-60% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly using the search results such as the "click to call” option. (Think with Google, 2019)
-Over a two-year period, there was a 200%+ growth in mobile searches for “open” + “now” + “near me." (Think with Google, 2018)
-46% of shoppers surveyed confirm inventory online before going to a store. (Think with Google, 2019)
-70% of shoppers surveyed say the ability to shop in-person/ in a store is important when deciding which brand or retailer to buy from. (Think with Google, 2019)
Organic Search
-About 64% of marketers actively invest time in search engine optimization (SEO). (HubSpot, 2020)
-Text will always be the foundation of search so making sure the text around your website's assets is descriptive will help them rank well in search. (HubSpot, 2020)
-To improve site performance, the top technical SEO tactic used by marketers is optimizing mobile performance. (HubSpot, 2020)
-49% of users say they use Google to discover or find a new item or product. (Think with Google, 2019)
-More than half (50.33%) of searches on Google now end without a click on a result. (Jumpshot via Sparktoro, 2019)
-As of June 2019, 94% of internet searches happen on a Google property. (Jumpshot via Sparktoro, 2019)
-Google uses 810 unique SERP features. Of those, 161 are found on more than 0.2% of keywords. (seoClarity, 2020)
(Source: Hubspot,2020)
To see how digital strategy connects to your Go-to-Market strategy, click here
Branding
Products are never just products, right?
Coca-Cola is more than a soda. Starbucks is more than a coffee. Ray-Ban is more than a pair of sunglasses. Glossier is more than a tube of concealer.
Interacting with these products provide experiences, and we buy them with that experience in mind. Better yet, the companies that create and market them know exactly the experience they want you to have when you make (or consider) a purchase.
That’s why they create a brand.
How do we help create your brand?
Determine your audience
If your brand doesn’t resonate with your audience, it won’t lead to that awareness, recognition, trust, and revenue. That’s where target market research comes in.
What you learn about your target market and buyer personas will influence your branding decisions down the line, so make this step your first priority.
Establish your mission statement
Before you can craft a brand that your audience recognizes, values, and trusts, you must be able to communicate the purpose that your business provides. Then, every part of your brand (logo, tagline, imagery, voice, and personality) can reflect that mission and vision.
Your mission statement is a building block of your brand manifesto, which encompasses why your organization exists and why people should care about your brand.
Create your visual assets
One of the more exciting parts of branding — visual design. We’re talking about your logo, color palette, typography (fonts), iconography, and other visual components.
As you create these elements, build a set of brand guidelines (or a brand style guide) to govern the composition and use of your visual assets. This will ensure that whoever uses your new branding does so accurately and consistently.
Putting your brand to work
Your brand only works if you do. Once we finish designing and creating your new brand (or rebrand), we integrate it throughout every inch of your business. We pay extra attention to ensure it’s displayed anywhere your business touches customers.
We approach this step by perfecting your presence, online and in print media.
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Website
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Social media
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Packaging
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Advertising (Digital and Print)
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Sales and Customer Service
Creative
Content marketing is the purposeful creation and sharing of written & visual media for a target audience, letting your audience learn about your brand, knowledge, products or services.
The primary forms of media used by businesses
(Source: Hubspot Research, Global Survey 2019)
Why is Content Marketing crutial?
Blogging
-Blogs are among the primary three forms of media used in content strategies today. (HubSpot, 2020)
-Companies spend 46% of their budget on content creation. (HubSpot, 2017)
-83% of traffic to marketing blogs comes from desktops. (SEMrush, 2019)
-In the marketing industry, the top-performing articles are over 5,700 words in length. (SEMrush, 2019)
-Articles that are >3,000 words get 3x more traffic, 4x more shares, and 3.5x more backlinks than shorter articles. (SEMrush, 2019)
-Listicles get 2x more shares than other blog post formats. (SEMrush, 2019)
-51% of companies say updating old content has proven the most efficient tactic implemented. (SEMrush, 2019)
-The majority of companies (67%) use organic traffic to measure their content success. (SEMrush, 2019)
(Source: Hubspot,2020)
Content Strategy
-78% of companies have a team of one-to-three content specialists. (SEMrush, 2019)
-Web traffic is among the top two most-common measurements of success for content marketing strategies. (HubSpot, 2020)
-24% of marketers plan on increasing their investment in content marketing in 2020. (HubSpot, 2020)
-Marketers today create content for multiple audience segments — marketing to three audience segments is most common. (HubSpot, 2020)
-Nearly 40% of marketers say content marketing is a very important part of their overall marketing strategy. (HubSpot, 2020)
-77% of companies say they have a content marketing strategy. (SEMrush, 2019)
-94% of marketers use social media for content distribution. (SEMrush, 2019)
(Source: Hubspot,2020)
Video
-Video has become the most commonly used format in content marketing, overtaking blogs and infographics. (HubSpot, 2020)
-Promotional videos and brand storytelling are the most common video types created by marketers. (HubSpot, 2020)
-87% of video marketers say that video has increased traffic to their website. (Wyzowl, 2020)
-80% of video marketers claim that video has directly increased sales. (Wyzowl, 2020)
(Source: Hubspot,2020)
Podcasts
-As of April, 2020, there are over 30 million podcast episodes in existence. (Podcast Insights via iTunes, 2020)
-75% of Americans age 12+ (approximately 212 million people) are now familiar with podcasting. (Edison Research, 2020)
-Monthly podcast listening now at 37%. (Edison Research, 2020) 39% of men and 36% of women age 12+ in the U.S. are monthly podcast listeners. (Edison Research, 2020)
-Podcasts now reach over 100 million Americans every month. (Edison Research, 2020) 45% of those in the U.S. age 12+ have listened to audio in a car through a cell phone. (Edison Research, 2020)
(Source: Hubspot,2020)
How do we approach Content Marketing?
Conversion Rate
Promotion
Design
Keyword Research
Content Research
Content Creation
What goes into our content marketing?
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Keyword Research: We identify keywords related to your product, analyze the volume (how often that keyword is searched) and difficulty of ranking for that keyword (i.e., how competitive that keyword is) and see who is already ranking for those keywords.
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Content research: Brainstorm content topics that include that keyword. See what articles already exist around these topics and begin to plan your content calendar.
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Content creation: Put those ideas into motion and have a writer create articles on those topics.
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Design: Add relevant images, infographics, videos, and other multimedia to your content so it’s more visual and engaging.
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Promote: Spread your content and drive traffic to your website by sharing the links via social media or emails to your customer database.
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Build links: Reach out to other publishers and ask them to link to your content to gain even more traffic with link building tactics. This gives you site authority, which helps improve your SEO rankings.
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Conversion rate: Track and measure the engagement and conversion rates of your content. Keep doing what works and drop what doesn’t. From there, begin the content creation cycle again.
Go - to - Market
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the way in which we help a company bring a product to market. It generally includes a business plan outlining the target audience, marketing plan, and sales strategy. Each product and market are different, therefore each GTM strategy is thoroughly thought out, by mapping a market problem and the solution a product / service offers.
How do we build a GTM Strategy?
Identifying the buying centers and personas
On average, there are 6.8 decision makers for every sale who have a say in whether a product is purchased. These people make up what is called the “buying center.”
The roughly seven roles are as follows:
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Initiator: Starts the buying process or shows initial interest
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User: Uses your product regularly
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Influencer: Convinces others the product is needed
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Decision maker: Gives final approval for the purchase
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Buyer: Owns the budget
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Approver: Final approver who pushes the initiative on a larger scale (typically someone in the C-suite)
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Gatekeeper: Blocker in getting a product implemented or approved
Optimize ads based on the results of our tests
We optimize your audience. Some ad platforms have highly targeted audience settings for advertisers. For example, LinkedIn offers options for job title, job function, company size, and geographic location. We test different options to see who is more likely to click or convert.
Create a value matrix to identify messaging
After mapping your buying center personas, it’s time to map out your value matrix.
A value matrix is a breakdown of each buying center persona, their business problems, how your product is valuable in solving those problems, and a relevant marketing message tying the problem and solution together.
We create a chart with each persona in one column. Below each persona, list the pain points they face on a daily basis.
Testing your messaging
We start advertising on marketing platforms using the messages we've just created for various audience members.
We’ll have three variables to test: the channel you advertise on, the audience you target, and the message you share.
When deciding where to test, we first consider where you audience is. Possible paid digital ad channels might be LinkedIn, Google Ads, Facebook, and Twitter.
We test the various channels and continue advertising on those showing high conversions. And stop investing in channels where you see low conversions.
Understanding the buyer's journey
From your customer’s perspective, the buying process is linear. More or less, it will go like this:
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The buyer realizes they have a business problem and research the topic
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The buyer shortlists potential solutions
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That list is narrowed down by talking to sales teams from the solution provider and by testing product use cases until a decision is made.
While each of our clients divides the lead generation and qualification process differently, marketing is typically in charge of ToFu and MoFu as they need to generate interest and awareness and educate the relevant audience on a product’s value through messaging and content.
Our goal is to bring a lead into the decision stage. Once a lead falls into the decision stage, your sales team takes over and the lead enter the sales funnel. This is where a lead considers purchasing your product.
The sales team must focus on the efficiency of the sales funnel, which usually looks something like:
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Contact
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Qualification
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Business Case
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Evaluation
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Negotiation
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Close
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Renewal
Build brand awareness and demand generation
Now we will fill your pipeline by snagging the attention of your target audience. This occurs through demand generation, which can happen with inbound and/or outbound strategies.
With inbound, prospects discover your brand through our marketing efforts and reach out to you or show signs of interest organically. Some examples of organic inbound traffic channels could be social media, content, or paid ads leading to a landing page. This is where our digital strategy comes in to play. To see our digital strategy, click here.
Outbound demand generation is when a salesperson contacts a lead through cold outreach tactics. They might to this by reaching out to a contact list, sending warm emails, phoning leads, or gathering leads at industry conferences.
Optimize your pipeline and increase conversion rates
Growth requires more than simply picking a sales strategy and building a demand generation process. We must optimize.
Sales is a numbers game, and you can only be successful if you measure progress. The key performance indicators (KPIs) for managing a sales team are volume, conversion rate, and time.
We'll also track how many opportunities come into the sales funnel: your pipeline volume.
Choosing one (or more) of our four sales strategies
There are generally four go-to-market sales strategies - each one catering to a different product and business model.
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The Self Service Model : The self-service model is when a customer makes a purchase on their own. We typically see this model with B2C purchases in which a customer can find and buy a product via a website, like Netflix or Amazon.
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The Inside Sales Business Model : The inside sales business model is when a prospect needs to be nurtured by a sales rep to convert into a deal. This type of model works best with a product of medium complexity and price. The sales cycle ranges between a few weeks and a few months. Here, you’ll invest in a sales team -- but inside sales reps are less expensive than field reps.
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The Field Sales Business Model : The field sales business model is when you have a full sales organization that closes large enterprise deals. These are typically complex products with high price points, which also means there’s typically a low volume of deals with a long sales cycle. The sales team in this model is often very costly as the field reps are experienced, high-salary employees. This model is easy to build, but harder to scale, because it takes time and money to hire and train a full sales organization.
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The Channel Model : In the channel model, an outside agency or partner sells your product for you. This is hard to build, as the people can be difficult to recruit and educate on the benefits of your product. They are also often less motivated to sell than your own sales team would be. However, this is a cheap model, because you don’t need to pay a sales team of your own. It works best with a product that matches with the partner’s interest. For example, if you sell phone cases, you might want to find partners selling related products, like Best Buy or Apple.
Create content to get inbound leads
Inbound leads are generally easier to convert and cheaper to acquire than outbound leads. This is because inbound leads are already partially educated on the business problem you solve, aware of your product, and usually more interested in buying your product.
Content marketing is the key to generating that inbound interest, as content will drive traffic to your site.
We will drive this inbound traffic by finding and targeting keywords that your potential customers would search for and then creating and posting related content on your website.
At the core of content marketing is search engine optimization (SEO), which is the way a search engine ranks the content on the internet once a query is entered into the search bar. This will be a main source for your organic web traffic.
To see how we tackle content creation, click here.
Analyze and short the sales cycle, to reduce customer acquisition costs
Our goal would be to shorten the conversion between every stage. This can be done by identifying common objections (and iterating ways to remove them before they happen), doing ongoing lead nurturing, and continue iterating ways to find the best fit customers.
Better optimization would lead to lower customer acquisition cost, and the higher the profit you get per customer.
Tap into your existing customers base
A common adage in the industry is that it costs 7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to do business with an existing customer. That's because, if you're providing a great buying experience, existing customers already know, like, and trust you.
The best opportunity for our clients to earn more and gain additional revenue is through renewals, cross-selling, and upselling.
