Over the last several years, B2B digital marketing has become a key aspect of driving revenue for organizations, allowing them to reach the right people at the right time and place, with measurable results. However, without an aligned strategy, digital marketing results can look like a massive waste of time and money, missing your key accounts and target audience.
Whether your goal is lead generation, demand generation, or account-based marketing, you need a scalable solution that aligns your organization internally and drives a successful, full-funnel digital marketing strategy based on the right goals. The solution begins with a bold and thorough plan — a digital marketing blueprint.
What is a Digital Marketing Blueprint?
A digital marketing blueprint — or a digital strategy blueprint — uses a multi-phase approach to analyze the goals and current marketing and sales strategy. By starting with an audit of the organization’s current condition, the process creates a customized, strategic digital marketing roadmap to drive measurable performance indicators and scalable and attributable revenue.
Key reasons you need a digital marketing strategy blueprint:
1. Validate what’s working and uncover what isn’t.
You might understand the value of digital marketing, but without knowing the real results of your initiatives, it’s hard to know what’s working and why. A digital marketing blueprint evaluates what is working by validating current strategy or tactics, and uncovering missed opportunities or mistakes.
2. Aligns the orientation of teams.
It’s not uncommon to find marketing teams working in silos with their own independent goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). When these KPIs aren’t referred to across other teams, the organization is not oriented in the same direction, leading to wasted budgets, missed opportunities, and misused resources. Here’s the truth: if your company wants to shift from lead generation to account-based marketing, your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned to ensure the greatest impact on your key accounts.
3. Evaluate value proposition and messaging.
Your brand messaging represents how you communicate your organization’s value proposition, personality, and differentiators across all channels. The digital marketing blueprint process determines if teams are speaking the same product language by asking these three questions:
- Who does the product/service serve or help?
- For what pains does this product/service provide solutions?
- How can we talk about those pains and solutions in a way that makes sense to your potential customer?
- What content do we have, or need to have, to align with that message?
The answers to these questions spotlight where teams may be disconnected from the brand messaging and determine how to approach aligning the marketing, sales, and product support teams. The goal is to align each team with the organization’s value proposition messaging and create a clear and consistent message for target ICPs, personas, and target companies to both address pain points and optimize personalization.
4. Uncover wasted resources and technical debt.
How do you know if your digital marketing activities are driving valuable leads or conversions? The blueprint process determines the true value of leads, MQLs, SQLs, MQAs, and more based on business goals. This helps you determine if your teams are truly aligned and if they have the tools to drive towards your goals with measurable pipeline generation tactics. It discovers where there is waste and provides a clear, scalable direction to maximizing your marketing budget towards activities that generate the most value.
Technical Debt: Many businesses also face issues with inefficient platforms or broken processes. Ideally, rebuilding platforms and processes would be the best option in this case, but the significant costs can prevent this. Most often, organizations will continue to work with these faulty processes, missing opportunities and buyers. A digital marketing blueprint helps address their technical debt, determining if it exists in their marketing automation platform, ABM platform, CRM, or elsewhere. The process evaluates the entire MarTech stack based on a deep understanding of goals and KPIs. This determines what they should be using, evaluates what they’re currently using, and what could be eliminated. Plus, it shows how to leverage current tools to get the most value.
5. Presents a clear path forward to sustainable scale and growth.
Organizations need a clear plan to create sustainable scale and growth. A blueprint provides a prioritized list of recommendations, ordered by value and impact, plus estimates of personnel requirements, timeline, and cost for implementation
How Does a Digital Marketing Blueprint Scale Pipeline Generation?
A digital marketing blueprint addresses the immediate needs of your organization. Additionally, it lays the foundation for sustained, long-term pipeline generation growth and resource allocation to drive leads, opportunities, and revenue efficiently.
Short-term pipeline generation tactics.
A key way to immediately improve pipeline generation activities is to identify wasted budgets in marketing activities such as marketing automation or paid media.
Example: Paid media campaigns often have high ad spend, but poor alignment with buyer journeys. The blueprint process includes technical audits of current pipeline generation tactics to identify waste and provide strategic recommendations that increase returns immediately.
Long-term pipeline generation.
Long-term pipeline generation improvements are driven by the implementation of message alignment, marketing orientation, and correct ICPs or target accounts. Proper budget distribution across all strategies and tactics improves efficiency and results in scalable and attributable revenue.
Digital Marketing Blueprint Phases
[Phase 1] Discovery & goal setting.
The first phase of a digital marketing blueprint framework addresses the fundamentals of building an effective digital marketing organization. It analyzes six strategic elements that provide insight into its current orientation. Whether your goal is ABM, or more efficient traditional pipeline generation, understanding the current orientation is critical before any further recommendations can be delivered.
Once this phase is completed, these six phases remain:
- Website Optimization
- Data Management
- Content Production
- Content Distribution
- Optimization
- Sales Alignment
[Phase 2] In-depth auditing & roadmap.
The second phase of the digital marketing blueprint features in-depth auditing and analysis by technical experts of the organization’s MarTech stack and pipeline generation activities. They evaluate key modules to uncover hidden issues, missed opportunities, or goal misalignment. They also will evaluate if you have strategic architects and technical implementers for each channel.
- Website Optimization
A thorough evaluation of the website is performed to ensure that it is fast, flexible, responsive, and communicates your message to your ICPs. This evaluation reviews CMS, web development, and creative elements, from functionality to user experience, branding, messaging, and personalization. The website architecture itself is also evaluated to see how information is organized, including navigation, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, internal linking, and URL structure.
- Data Management
A thorough evaluation of the website is performed to ensure that it is fast, flexible, responsive, and communicates your message to your ICPs. This evaluation reviews CMS, web development, and creative elements, from functionality to user experience, branding, messaging, and personalization. The website architecture itself is also evaluated to see how information is organized, including navigation, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, internal linking, and URL structure.
- Content Production
By evaluating your collaborative and relevant content production, it’s possible to identify if your content provides real value to your prospects and accounts. Specifically, it determines if your message is aligned throughout the organization and with your ICPs or target accounts and confirms whether your content and messaging are data-driven and aligned with the customer journey.A content audit answers the following questions:- Are we providing solutions for our target accounts or audience?
- Are we reaching our target audience?
- Are we effectively communicating the value to the audience?
- Is there existing content that can be repurposed?
- Is there a missed opportunity for new content that the customer base is looking for?
- Content Distribution:
Once organization and planning are complete, it’s time to audit the content distribution, evaluating how well organizations disseminate content across each marketing channel to drive engagement, leads, and opportunities.The results of the content distribution audit offer clear recommendations for each channel to address immediate issues and improve long-term scalability. The observed marketing channels include:- Paid Media: Are the correct audiences being targeted? Do the targeted keywords bring in users that are engaged and relevant? Are the budgets aligned optimally to generate high-quality leads? Are you utilizing the right array of ad platforms to capture your core audiences?
- SEO: Is the content and web experience optimized for search? How often is the organization producing new content? Does the organization optimize and refresh existing content? Is new, optimized content being posted consistently?
- Email Marketing: Does the organization see success from email marketing campaigns? Does the email content resonate with your target audiences? Are you optimizing subject lines, email body, preview text, sender information, send timing, and more?
- Optimization, Sales & Marketing Alignment
Here, the blueprint offers direction to both sales and marketing teams by providing tools to improve synergy and ensure that each element of content production and distribution is improving performance over time. This includes accurate KPI reporting that informs strategic decisions. Marketing content can empower your sales team and align sales outreach with marketing activities in timing, messaging, and structure. For ABM, alignment between the sales and marketing teams is key to generating the most impact on the most valuable accounts.
- Internal Stakeholder Interviews
By understanding team interactions and receiving feedback from internal stakeholders, auditors receive valuable information as to what is going on internally and is key during the blueprint process. This provides real-time insight into opportunities for collaboration and cross-team coordination. Additionally, this research helps set team expectations to align communication, goals, and KPIs.
[Phase 3] Executive presentation.
The final output of a digital marketing blueprint is a customized, in-depth document of all findings. It diagnoses core strengths and weaknesses, reviews the selections and implementation of your MarTech stack, and provides a prioritized list of recommendations to improve performance immediately. It goes in-depth for each of the elements described above to provide specific recommendations that will evangelize your needs internally for organizational alignment and scalability.
[Phase 4] Content distribution and campaign implementations.
The organization now has a clear path forward to distribute the message to its ICPs, personas, or target accounts. This is when branding, messaging, and ads are distributed across the various pipeline generation channels. Each channel’s marketing strategy is mapped out and clearly defined goals, expectations, timelines, and traditional KPIs are established.
A clear outline improves cross-team coordination and communication. The campaign strategy process schedules deployments, campaigns, and content distribution, from paid media, SEO, email marketing, and more.
Paid Media
Launching paid media campaigns requires strategy, technical expertise, and full-funnel alignment. It takes more than simply having a bigger budget than the competition. The blueprint process gathers data from the past and present. First, by evaluating past paid media efforts, providing recommendations based on the discovery phase, and then performing technical audits of current channels and historical results.
It also ensures:
- The marketing message is mapped through the process
- Full-funnel campaign architectures are built
- Budgets are defined optimally to generate high-quality leads
- Strategies to maximize ad spend are implemented across each paid media channel
SEO
Implementing a comprehensive SEO strategy creates long-lasting benefits and is the backbone of a strong organic presence. Search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint. The SEO strategy defines the short and long-term SEO objectives and provides a foundation for the rest of the marketing efforts.
Short-term SEO objectives include:
- Technical website optimizations
- Off-site presence assessment
- Creation of organic traffic conversion goals
Long-term SEO objectives are:
- Optimization of existing content
- New content creation and post scheduling
- External backlink outreach
Email Marketing
Effective email marketing and automation allow for targeting and converting key audiences and accounts. Email marketing messaging needs to resonate with the target audience through proper message mapping and personalization. Combined with automation, this strategy nurtures leads and drives accounts down the funnel for maximum engagement.
Email marketing tactics include:
- Evaluating the relevancy of the contact list target audience.
- Ensuring email content resonates with the recipient and encourages interaction with the message
- Personalization of outbound communications
- Scheduling deployments at the correct time and frequency
- Tracking engagement rates and using data to optimize email campaigns
Whether your organization chooses to implement the recommendations of a digital marketing blueprint itself or enlist help, Digital Reach is equipped to support your in-house implementation team and/or execute strategic recommendations from marketing automation, web development and design, paid media, and more.
The Outcome of a Digital Marketing Blueprint
A digital marketing blueprint provides a clear, customized roadmap and strategic execution plan. It outlines the tactics your organization should implement to reach revenue goals and produce the pipeline to drive revenue. When it’s put in motion, a fully aligned digital marketing strategy is achieved by laying the foundation of an effective marketing department and navigating teams through each step of implementation.
Let Digital Reach evaluate your strategic marketing efforts and put your organization on the right course to success. For a complimentary consultation on your account-based marketing and pipeline generation goals, please contact us.
