today I'm not going to give you a digital marketing strategy that you can apply directly to your business because honestly that's not how digital marketing strategies work what I am going to do is share a framework that you can use to come up with the perfect digital marketing strategy for your business now there's four steps in this process and we're going to fill them in as we go along the first step is to have a quick think about what we're going to leave behind the stuff that isn't serving us now if we're talking about 2024
I feel like there's a few things that we're going to need to leave behind in 20 5 but some of the things that we tend to suggest businesses let go of are things like generating terrible copy with AI where they've put no effort in whatsoever or making assumptions about customers and target audience without ever actually speaking to those customers and target audience of course the danger of this is that you make assumptions about that customer you build a strategy around those assumptions and then the strategy doesn't work CU that customer never actually existed another thing
that you might want to let go of is copying strategies directly from other businesses even businesses that are in the same sort of Industries other things that people sometimes want to let go of are copying marketing strategies from other businesses without making the changes without customizing them to your business and finally let's make this the year that you're unafraid to test new things so if there's anything that you've been doing that hasn't been serving you the first step is to just write it down this is the stuff we're going to let go of goodbye get
in the bin for next year okay the next stage in our process is to take stock of what has been working really well for you and there's two two main areas that we're going to do this the first area that we're going to take stock is in your budget and spending so starting at the top level what do we actually achieve with this year's budget then drill down further which are the highest spend areas and did they generate Roi that you're expecting for example is each Channel working hard enough for you or are you putting
spend there because that's just what we do when we're working with clients we break down the revenue generated by each different marketing channel this really helps us and the client work out the white of every single area that they're investing in that means we can have a really straightforward conversation that says are we spending money in the most productive areas or could that budget better be deployed elsewhere of course you've got to be careful to compare like for like here there are some marketing channels that generate fast Roi like paid ads for example there are
others that generate a much slower Roi but that can generate a huge return over months and years so things like content marketing an SEO for example you might not see an Roi month to month on some of these things but over quarters or a year you should see significant return and of course you want to take stock a level deeper than this as well say that you're running paid ads on a few different channels well which are the channels that are performing best for you and then go a level deeper than that which are the
particular campaigns which are the strategies that you're using which are working best for you and which are the ones where actually they're not performing too well you can take that budget and deploy it elsewhere now there might also be some marketing Tech in your budget and spending which maybe you're not using fully maybe you can downgrade some of your tool subscriptions or maybe you can combine some you might want to get a tool like semrush which has pretty much everything that you could want you can get a free trial at thank you ninjas docomo that
you want to take stock of is where your best lead and sales are coming from now it really helps to have good data we'll come back to data a little bit later of course it's a good idea to not just look at your best leads in sales but go forward and look at where your best customers are where are your highest spending customers and which channel did they originally come from this is is all really important information as part of this take stock phase which will inform your strategy Building from here a quick tip here
what you might find is that some of your digital marketing channels that are driving really good quality customers for example email marketing you might not be putting that much energy and attention into so they're generating a small amount of very high quality customers with relatively little attention relatively little budget and focus those can be great channels to take into the next stage of this process because if you increase the amount of energy you put into them it's likely that they'll yield a really high return so this isn't just about saying which are the digital marketing
channels that are bringing me the most high quality leads and sales it's about saying which channels are performing best given the amount of time and budget we're putting into them okay so at this point we've figured out where we are now it's time to think about where we want to be and we're going to start by setting some goals for the next year we're big Believers at exposure ninjja of setting goals that Cascade down from the business's goals so for example we've got a client that sets us goals like we want to expand into a
new territory this year and we need digital marketing that's going to bring in some leads and sales in a space that we're new to or we want to increase our website Revenue 15% over the next year and these are business goals that are tied to our favorite metrics namely Revenue so these are targets that are set by the business and have very clear metrics to achieve now you may of course set some specific goals as well things like growing a certain audience in your email list or generating X number of conversions a month but where
possible make these goals smart you know specific measurable achievable realistic and time based inside exposure ninja we like to track all of our clients goals in a spreadsheet month by month so we'll set for example if we need to get to a certain number of leads per month we'll set Milestones each month for the number of leads that we want to be generating that way we can see throughout the year whether we're on track overachieving or underachieving and we can calibrate our actions according if you have very general goals like build a social media following
or increase our engagement through email it's very difficult to know whether you're actually achieving those goals or not so we're big fans of specific targets and numbers that you can measure against where possible okay so once you've got these goals and by the way it's a good idea to have as few goals as you possibly can the more goals you have the more confusing it gets and the more watered down each one of those goals is now I've got three blobs on my framework here but the likelihood is that this section will will take the
most time because this is where you build out detailed plans to achieve each of your goals let's say for example there's a business goal to increase Revenue 20% over the next 12 months and underneath that you might have a marketing goal which is increase your revenue from email marketing by 50% over the next 12 months so you're then going to make a plan for your email marketing to achieve that email marketing goal so this might be reviewing your current email sequences to see where they're performing where people are dropping off where the unsubscribed are coming
from he might be searching competitor email sequences wireframing some new email designs and so on these plans are really important we see lots of businesses that come to us with very clear marketing goals but they really have absolutely no idea how they're going to achieve them now it turns out that's okay because that's what we do for clients but let's say for example that you want to increase the revenue through your website by 20% over the next year what you need to spend some time on is working out exactly how you're going to do that
for example are you going to work on improving your visibility in AI overviews in order to generate more traffic in order to convert more leads do you want to improve the performance of your website and exactly how are you going to do that are you going to add more calls to action across the site you're going to add popup ctas offering bit overwhelmed so you might need to start being a little bit brutal here you're also going to want to think about the team that you've got available so the time resource that you've got and
also the budget that you have as well if not all of these plans are going to be achievable with the team and the budget that you've got then you're in a priority situation you have to work out what the top priorities are and also what are the things that you can afford to kill off or postpone for next year it turns out there's nothing less motivating than having big goals amazing plans and then setting off with absolute Ely no chance of achieving them cuz you just don't have the resource at your disposal and by the
way if you're looking at all of this and thinking I'm struggling to prioritize this I'd really value talking to someone who knows this sort of thing inside out does this all day then contact the team at exposure ninja this is what we do we help clients build digital marketing strategies and then we execute on them the first step to doing this is to request the free website and marketing review from exposure ninja.com revie so during this process in the review form we ask you some of the taking stock questions we also ask you for your
goals we'll then do some analysis and suggest some of the plans that you might want to implement in order to get you there this service is completely free of charge and it is fantastic but not everyone is eligible so you do need to apply for this and to apply for this just go to exposure ninja.com review that's exposure ninja.com revie as a side note having a third party sort of Outsider help you with this process can be really beneficial I know firsthand that when you're inside the business all day every day doing this stuff it
can be really difficult to step out and see things from a 30,000 ft view sometimes having an Outsiders perspective shows you some obvious stuff that you either hadn't been seeing or been pretending not to see so this review process is really really useful as you're going through planning your digital marketing strategy now I also want to talk about the importance of using data when you're building your Str strategy as you're taking stock you should hopefully be analyzing data that you have about your customers about the performance of your different marketing channels when you're setting goals
you should ideally be setting goals which you can verify your performance against using the data that you're collecting about your marketing performance through things like ga4 and then of course the best plans have a data component to them as well let me give you an example so one of our clients that we've won awards for we built an incredible email marketing campaign that was very data Centric we use their data to segment Their audience and personalize the emails that they receiving now you may have heard me talk about them before cuz I absolutely love the
work we did but basically they're a fabric store and they have people buying Fabrics with all different skill levels and experience levels of working with fabric so they have professionals who spend all day doing fabric stuff and then they have amateurs who just want to do a bit of quilting or something in their spare time the challenge for us was how do we build email sequences that take into consideration these completely different levels of specialism and what we did is we actually used the customer data to do that we actually asked the customers when they
signed up which level they were at we then used this data to segment the customers and send them in different automations that meant that the content we sent them was much more personalized and tailored to their experience level so we got a much higher Roi than if we just put everyone in the same bucket and send them all the same series of emails in fact the camp campaign generated 13 times Roi and we increased their total email subscriber Base by almost 40% in just 6 months now those email automations are set up now they will
work for as long as they're left to run so that Roi only increases over time it's one of the great things about email marketing but one of the filters I'd encourage you to look at this whole exercise to is how you're going to use your customers data in the next year to build a marketing strategy which maximizes Roi now now another thing to think about when you're designing your marketing strategy is also to leave a bit of empty space in here as well when we're building a plan like this we're designing something that's going to
run over 12 months but we don't know everything that's going to happen along the way in those 12 months sometimes things pop up that we don't expect for example maybe there's some AI thing that comes out which causes a big shift in your space or a pandemic so it's a good idea to leave a bit of wiggle room with time and budget in your plans for the unexpected to come up of course you're also going to review this strategy throughout the year so you can make changes on the flight we tend to review our marketing
strategies with our clients every quarter we find that's a good frequency for allowing us to see where we're going with something without changing things too quickly before they've been allowed time to actually take effect okay Tim what about those things that we've never done before maybe we've never tested cro we don't know how well it's going to work we don't know what sort of conversion rate should be possible on our website that's absolutely okay too and some of these things is impossible to know until you've actually started doing them so another really important part of
this is giving your space the time and budget for testing and experimentation if you're going into a new area for you allow some spare budget for things that go wrong that you're not anticipating or that take a bit longer to generate the results that you're expecting say that your website is underperforming and that you need a new website built because your conversion rate sucks well it doesn't make any sense to then project that you're going to have an industry-leading conversion rate in the same year that you're building your new website because it might take you
time to refine and optimize based on the data that you're collecting about how people are using your website so you do need a bit of flexibility in your plans remember no plan survives first contact with the Enemy and all that so there you have it a datadriven adaptable framework for building your marketing strategy for the next year forget about copying Trends or following the crowd or just copying word for word some thing that you read online this is the year that you build a marketing strategy for your business so again figure out what you're going
to let go of first then take stock of where you're at at the moment set some goals these should ideally be cascading down from the business's goals set some marketing goals underneath them and then build the plans that are going to achieve those Embrace data and give yourself some space for testing and unpredictable things that pop up during the year now at the start we spoke about understanding your customer and for any marketing strategy to work you need to understand your marketing funnel watch this video to show how to map this out and why your
marketing funnel might not be performing as well as it could do until next time see you soon
