Navigating digital marketing efforts

Every situation is a little bit different, but there are some core elements that you’ll probably want to make part of your digital marketing efforts. First and foremost, digital marketing is a team effort. The main players generally include:

  • Marketing navigator,
  • company leadership,
  • sales,
  • SMEs

Each of these roles brings a unique set of skills and knowledge necessary to engage your buyers along their journey. If they aren’t working together as a team, you’re done before you get started.

Marketing, sales and leadership need to work together as a team

This is a necessary but insufficient condition. In order for you to stand a chance, you need to all be (mostly) aligned on direction, working together as a semi-coherent unit.

You can’t afford to be finger-pointing or lobbing partial answers back and forth. If it looks like that, you need to hit the reset button.

Why?

Because digital marketing will probably be one of the hardest things you take on at your company.

Assuming you’re in the B2B tech services world, you’re going to need to do a lot of trust building with your potential customers in order to form relationships with them. That’s not an easy thing to do.

There are very few tricks. No silver bullets.

If you put garbage into this process, you’ll get garbage out.

So how do you get everyone marching in a similar direction?

You remove egos and you create common goals that everyone is working toward.

What should goals look like?

They should be things like:

  1. Increase the number of sales-ready leads.
  2. Increase awareness of your company.
  3. Increase the amount of support content available to the sales team.
  4. Increase the number of opportunities with existing customers.

Do yourself a favor with these goals: they should be used to set direction, not to beat people over the head.

An example of a bad goal: “30% more opportunities with existing customers in 12 months”. Why is this a bad goal?

  1. Fear of not hitting a particular target is generally not the best motivator, and can create unintended consequences.
  2. There are too many factors outside of the team’s control to create anything more than a directional goal.

The marketing navigator will usually want to keep a pulse on the level of alignment. Leadership needs to be bought in, as does sales. Your SMEs need to be in support mode when called upon, mostly for content creation.

Which marketing methods are worth experimenting with?

You don’t want to just randomly match any marketing method with any scenario.

You want to select methods based on what you sell, which determines where your audience is and how they prefer to engage, balanced against your company’s preferences and capabilities.

There are quite a few methods to choose from: outbound, inbound, search, content, trade show, referral, partner, social, etc (RocLogic generally prefers inbound, content & search).

Once you select a reasonable method, you’ll need to experiment in order to understand if it’s truly a viable method for your company.

Check out this article on How to get started with digital marketing to get a feel for the main digital marketing methods and how to select one over another.

Which problems are worth trying to market?

You may solve lot’s of different problems. That doesn’t mean you need to market all of them, and you definitely don’t want to try to focus on all of them at once.

This is a very exciting yet challenging experimental process. While you can get some basic idea about what’s not worth trying to market, you won’t know what’s actually going to work until you start testing the market and get traction.

There’s no substitute for putting the work in.

The process looks like:

  1. Find a reasonable niche (see Why you Need a niche and what to do about it).
  2. Create content.
  3. Run tests.
  4. Analyze results.
  5. Iterate to optimize.

If you do get traction within a particular niche, it will likely get easier at some point, but you’ll probably want to continue updating/optimizing because your environment is usually changing around you (eg. your customers, your competitors, and marketing platforms like Google).

What content should I create?

No matter which marketing methods you utilize, you’re probably going to need content.

Question is: what kind of content should you focus on creating?

That depends on your overall marketing goal(s). You’re going to create different types of content for sales-ready leads than you are for awareness, and different still for sales support and existing customers.

Your content is likely to include a subset of:

  1. Articles
  2. Landing pages
  3. White papers
  4. Webinars
  5. Case studies
  6. Calculators

Your marketing navigator should generally be a heavy influencer of both format and topic selection at a high level. Making the call on content requires empathy and some level of analytical skills.

How do I go about creating content?

Whether the marketing navigator pulls the info out of the team’s heads or simply sets the high level topic and oversees the effort, the marketing navigator should be involved in content creation. They’ll usually want to heavily influence what content to create, when to create it, and analyze it.

The raw content should almost always come from the person/people that know the most about the topic (the SMEs). Depending on the topic at hand, the SME could be an individual contributor, leadership, or sales. It could be a combination of these people.

Sometimes it makes more sense to gather information via email, sometimes an interview makes more sense, and other times it makes sense for the SME to start by drafting the content.

There will usually be several iterations to get to the final published piece of content. The process generally looks something like this:

  1. Select topic.
  2. Select engagement channel(s).
  3. Frame topic.
  4. Draft content.
  5. Iterate until satisfied.
  6. Review.
  7. Publish.
  8. Track and analyze.

How do I make sense of what I’m seeing?

The marketing navigator will likely want to analyze data produced by the various experiments/tests in play based on market feedback from content and paid efforts.

This analysis should usually help influence which topics to dive deeper into and/or optimize and which to de-emphasize or abandon all together.

Next Steps

Looking for help with your digital marketing? Check out RocLogic’s digital marketing services and reach out if you’d like to chat about how we might work together.

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