Would you embark on a long road trip without a map of your route? Just as you need to know where you're going before leaving home, embarking on a quest to improve your company's online marketing plan requires a detailed digital roadmap.
From initial planning and goal-setting to copywriting and website development, every aspect of your digital marketing strategy can be included in this master plan. Like atlas maps, these digital maps should follow a measured structure and format to maximize their effectiveness.
What Is a Tactical, Digital Roadmap?
Your company's website redesign roadmap is the logical outgrowth of the clear, constructive business goals that underpin your online marketing plan. It's made during a consultation with your digital marketing consultant, advisor or agency and consists of a number of steps that ensure your overall plan remains on track.
Since there are a lot of moving parts involved, close communication and direct but constructive feedback are both critical to its effectiveness.
Although it's useful to have your plan mapped out before you begin work on your website redesign or new marketing campaign, its components aren't set in stone. In response to new inputs or challenges, you can tweak or realign its components to better suit your company's needs.
Aligning Your Goals, Strategies and Tactics
Successful digital marketing roadmaps align your goals, strategies and tactics. This is where your map might differ from that of your competitors. If your goal is to position your firm as a thought leader in its field, for example, you might use a website redesign in conjunction with an aggressive publishing and social media marketing campaign to broadcast your content to new prospects.
If you're looking to generate new leads and boost your conversion rates, your roadmap might be geared towards:
- Implementing a content marketing capability to attract your ideal prospects or personas
- Creating Call-to-Actions with landing pages that lead them to downloadable premium content offers that cater to their need for information
- Automating your lead nurturing process via a marketing automation platform and email workflows to nurture leads and move prospects through their buying cycle, significantly increasing your conversion rates
- Giving your prospects a compelling reason to engage with you
Regardless, you'll select your overarching strategy - in conjunction with the specific tactics necessary to execute it effectively - through consultations with your own team and your digital marketing consultants.
How It Works in Practice
What does a tactical, digital roadmap look like in practice? Most importantly, it includes a series of steps and sub-steps that keep your project on track. Although yours might look slightly different, an example digital roadmap might include:
- Information gathering: Conducting a Kick-off meeting, finalizing goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), identifying functional requirements, inventorying existing content, generating an updated sitemap and information architecture, and identifying new content for creation
- Strategy: Planning meetings that include company stakeholders, digital marketing consultants, designers, developers, and content managers
- Copywriting and design: Outlining and creating the various elements of your website's content, design and navigation including content marketing tactics and implementation such as blog articles, press releases, premium content offers, eNewsletters, etc.
- Development and launch: Handling development, third party application integration, systems testing, review, approval and launch of your website
- Marketing campaign launch: Begin various digital marketing campaigns such as content marketing, SEO, social media, eNewsletters, PR and advertising
Whether you're an ambitious startup or an established firm that's a thought leader in its field, your past successes wouldn't have been possible without careful planning and follow-through. No one can tell you exactly how your digital roadmap will look, but the basic tenets that we've outlined here can give you necessary guidance as you develop your digital marketing strategy and position your company for online success.
Learn how one company started generating qualified lead sales by downloading the free case study “Digital Marketing That Converts: See How A New Digital Marketing Plan Drove A 210% Increase In Conversion Rate.”
