Every marketer’s dream is to find the best channels for attracting and converting customers. You need to know who is most likely to purchase your product. Today, marketing efforts are all online in a bid to capture the greatest market share. With the average person spending around 7 hours a day online, dividing time between web browsing, email, and social media, there are many options for targeting specific demographics based on certain preferences.
Sites like LinkedIn make it easier to place ads according to the job industry, while search engines facilitate paid ad placements. Firms are spending a lot of money on digital marketing efforts, and there’s increased scrutiny on the efficiency of digital marketing campaigns. Marketers are constantly trying for cost-effective growth by adjusting spending across channels. There are hundreds of digital channels to choose from, so it is important that the team sets a clear strategy with attainable goals that can help the team understand what’s to be done and which channel to invest in. That is what a digital marketing roadmap does.
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What is a Digital Marketing Roadmap?
A digital marketing roadmap visualizes how marketers depend on different channels to promote their products or firm. Digital marketing channels encompass SEO and SEM, email, display/banner ads, website conversion rate optimization, and social media. There is a multitude of channels within a marketer’s toolbox, and digital marketing roadmaps can help bring clarity to difficult plans, highlighting the vital initiatives. Marketing leaders depend on digital marketing roadmaps to push their strategy pan-organization. It’s a great tool for establishing buy-in and garnering support for marketing initiatives.
Creating a Digital Marketing Roadmap – What you should know?
Various roadmaps offer different levels of detail and information. Keep in mind your audience and how they might use it. What information do they need, and how often are they to be updated? Such answers can help you decide your roadmap’s structure and tell you what information to include or not. Once your high-level goals and initiatives as well as activities to support them have been established, specify the work to be done in each channel. It is important to include time frames for the start and end of the work, along with important milestones along the way. Assign work to your teams, based on deadlines. Gantt charts are a nice way to visualize your plan because you can view major milestones and cross-work dependencies in case of multiple projects. You can also curate a custom roadmap to fit your requirements, which will allow you to control the level of detail to be included. You can club work by goals, initiative, or campaigns and show how individual activities support said work.
Why is it Important to have a Digital Marketing Roadmap?
A digital marketing roadmap lays out major focus areas, ensuring that iterations are grounded in strategy. Data tracked by marketers form new iterations like revised email copy or a new landing page design. These experiments must stay grounded in the established goals and strategy. For those who are building a digital marketing roadmap, the goal is to facilitate the following,
Alignment – A roadmap heavy on strategy rallies teams around the work that needs to be done. It shows who has what responsibility and gives details of deadlines and deliverables. A good roadmap demonstrates how each teammate’s work contributes towards the team’s end goals.
Communication – Digital marketing usually requires support from other areas of a marketing organization. For instance, you may need content and creative help on fresh digital assets. Having a roadmap means keeping cross-functional work on a schedule. Roadmaps facilitate communication and this is key to achieving your goals.
Visibility – Digital marketing plays an indispensable role in acquiring customers. Teams will want to know the work’s progress and your plan to make your activities impactful. Having a roadmap ensures that the broader marketing team and your company are informed of when the next initiative or campaign is happening.
Progress – A digital marketing roadmap can help you track progress so your hard work sees results. This information is important during budgeting meetings if you want additional resources to support your effort. Tracking your progress and justifying expenses is always necessary. A roadmap can help you achieve exactly that.
Key Elements of a Digital Marketing Roadmap
A digital marketing roadmap may either be simple or complex and can cover both broad campaigns or small initiatives. Once you decide what you want to include in your roadmap, you can organize and prioritize your ideas and start implementing them. Some key elements of a marketing roadmap that you could consider are –
Objectives – Your roadmap should start by defining your short and long-term business objectives. By setting clear goals you have the option to create a digital marketing plan to align with said goals and develop a strategy to achieve these goals within the shortest possible time frame.
Audience – Your customers must be the focal point of your digital marketing roadmap. While you are formulating your online marketing strategy, taking surveys and interviewing current customers is important. Conducting consumer research helps because you know where your audience is spending the most time online, and what they are looking for when they search for a business solution like yours. Find out how they know about your product. For instance, if you are depending on paid ads on Facebook, but customer analysis finds that most people find you through Twitter, maybe it’s time for a change in marketing tactics. Understand the kind of content you need to create by speaking to customers and gauging their pain points. Address these points in your marketing and break down conversion barriers. Once you understand who your audience is, you can develop consumer personas and get a better idea of how to target these people online.
Competition – You must understand who your competition is. Figuring out the mechanics of their businesses can help you. Find out their SEO keywords, their SERP information, and how much they are spending on advertising. Find out the gaps in their marketing strategy and messaging that you can exploit to your advantage. Scan their social media especially Facebook to find out what their ad campaigns are like. There are many tools to help with such online research. Spyfu is a software that tells you Adwords keywords, organic rankings, and ad variations of your competition for 13 years. Competitive analysis can help you develop your digital marketing roadmap by giving you the data you require to make informed decisions regarding positioning yourself against other competitors in the market.
Website – Your website needs to be top-notch. It is an important part of your digital marketing roadmap and it should always be present to build your brand and attract fresh prospects. Wrong messaging, poor copy, and bad user experience will frustrate site visitors and derail all your other marketing efforts. The most well-planned marketing campaigns fall flat when traffic arrives at a poor website. It is challenging to get websites right, especially SaaS sites where the primary goal is to convert visitors to customers. There are many website best practices that companies should implement to increase conversions. Functional sites mean you don’t have to rely on 3rd party platforms with pricey ad fees and ever-changing algorithms to help you grow your business.
Content Planning and Creation– According to the Content Marketing Institute, 72% of marketers state that content marketing is responsible for the increase in the number of leads for their business. Content is a very important asset, and per dollar spent, content creation is responsible for 3 times as many leads as other forms of marketing, all while costing around 62% less. Content marketing is a vital part of a digital marketing roadmap because each piece of content created drives interest and engagement and thereby pave the way for future conversions. Developing a content calendar or hiring a content marketing manager is very useful, as you’ll find out a plan for the exact topics needed to be covered, why they are vital, what format they may be in and how you wish to distribute and share each piece of content. Content can include blogs, videos, webinars, podcasts, Facebook/Instagram stories, eBooks, case studies, and more. Having a content strategy in place will ensure less stress and a faster time to market in terms of creating fresh content.
Social Media – The customer and competition research you carry out must shed some light on the best places for your brand to show up on social media. Advertising on just two platforms and narrowing down your content will ensure you save time, and will help you decide whether these platforms work well for your business. Consider your target audience and how that might affect the social network you use or how you communicate within that network. Keep testing for different results so you know which space to use to promote your firm. Whichever platform you choose, your presence on social media is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build your brand.
Paid Search – Paid campaigns are an important part of a digital marketing roadmap despite rising advertising costs. Planning, testing, and budgeting should be included so you don’t make mistakes. If you don’t have experience with paid ads, start small and gradually build up the amount you invest in them.
Sample Digital Road Map
- Begin with strategy.
- Determine maximum cost.
- SEO
- Facebook Ads
- Google Ads
- Guest Posting.
- Landing page
- Get Attention
- Build Interest
- Create Desire
- Get Action
- Get Reviews
Conclusion
With hundreds of digital channels to choose from, it is important that the team set a clear strategy with attainable goals that can help the team understand what’s to be done and which channel to invest in. We hope this blog can help you design that strategy. To read more of such intriguing content, check out our Blog!
