FGM Internet Marketing is your one-stop shop for all things digital marketing. We don’t start every new project with a website redesign. In fact, many of our clients come to us with fantastic, well-functioning websites, but they’re just not hitting the mark when it comes to marketing.
That’s where FGM steps in to take your digital marketing to the next level. Over the past decade, we’ve created a process we call the Digital Physical + Strategy. During the Digital Physical phase, we take a deep dive into your organization’s digital marketing efforts, current website, social media, email marketing, and online advertising. From there, we launch into the Strategy, outlining the organization’s goals and how to get there using digital marketing.
Below, we’ve pulling back the curtain and taking you through our Digital Physical + Strategy process so you can think critically about your organization’s digital marketing efforts.
The Website Audit
Our Digital Physical starts with a client overview, a snapshot of the organization at this point in time, allowing both FGM and the client to share an understanding of the organization’s current standing.
Following the client overview is the website audit. The key areas we examine are:
- Technical (is the website mobile friendly? What platform is the website built on? How easy is it to update or change the website? Does the website track things like visitors and actions?)
- Content (Is the current website copy well-written? Does it accurately describe the organization? Does it attract the attention of its intended audience?)
- Search engine optimization (Does the website rank organically on search engines? Is it ranking for desired search terms? Is the website structured in a way to enhance SEO?)
The Social Media Audit
An important part of our Digital Physical is the social media audit. We look at your organization’s social media accounts to understand your follower count, posting frequency and content, and engagement stats. We highlight your wins and areas for improvement.
The Online Advertising Audit
Our Digital Physical continues with an audit of the client’s online advertising. This is when we look at their mix of online advertising. Are they using search ads, display ads, social media ads, in-app advertising? Does this traffic go to their website and is it getting the results they are looking for? This helps us understand how a client is reaching their prospective customers.
Email Marketing Audit
If a new client already does email marketing, we review their email marketing campaigns. We ask things like how did you build your email marketing database? What is the average open rate and click-through rate for your emails? How often do you send them? And are they driving sales, loyalty, brand awareness, or a mix of everything? Email is still one of the best digital marketing tools and we want to see how it’s being utilized.
Ecommerce Audit
The final piece of our Digital Physical includes an audit of a client’s online shop if they have one. E-commerce can be a powerful revenue tool if done right, so our audit aims to understand if their current online store works well for the business and its customers. Questions we ask include how many products are in the store? Are the product imagery and product descriptions compelling? What is the store’s conversion rate? How easy or difficult is the checkout process for a customer?
Throughout our Digital Physical process, we are learning the ins and outs of our new client’s online presence, taking note of what’s working and what needs improvement. This is the foundation for the next step in our process – the Digital Strategy.
The Digital Strategy
After completing the Digital Physical, we move onto the Digital Strategy, where we develop a plan so our client can reach their goals through digital marketing.
The first part of our Digital Strategy is competition analysis. We ask our client to identify three competitors. We then conduct an abbreviated Digital Physical for these 3 competitors – website audit, SEO audit, social media, online advertising, and an e-commerce audit.
With competitor analysis, our goal is to learn from what others are doing well and from their mistakes.
Customer Avatars
The second part of our Digital Strategy is identifying our client’s ideal customers. We do this by creating avatars, a fictional person that embodies the qualities of an ideal customer or has the traits of a person who is most likely to benefit from the client’s product or service.
By creating ideal customer avatars we want to get detailed down to traits like age, gender, race, socio-economic status, location, marital status, profession, hobbies, etc. These help us focus our future messaging and marketing so it’s more likely to resonate with the ideal customer.
SWOT Analysis
The Digital Strategy continues with a SWOT analysis. Here we zoom out and consider the organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. We want to lean into the existing strengths, work on the weaknesses, grab hold of the opportunities, and prepare for the threats to the organization.
Key Issues
To wrap up the first section of our Digital Strategy process, we define the organization’s key issues. FGM Internet Marketing’s focus is your digital marketing, but an organization is more than just the marketing team. A key issue may be a lack of resources, either financial or human.
It’s important that any key issues the organization is facing are identified in our document so that we don’t create a strategy that is out of reach for our clients. Writing a strategy for a small to medium enterprise will look completely different than a strategy written for a multinational corporation.
Organizational Goals
Part II of the Digital Strategy is where we start shaping the future of your organization. We start with defining your organization’s goals and objectives. Goals could be growth oriented, like increasing revenue over the next two years, or focused on longevity like repositioning the organization to serve a different purpose or audience.
In general, a goal is an achievable outcome that is broad and longer term. They can also be intangible and non-measurable. Whereas an objective is shorter term, tangible, and defines a measurable action to achieve an overall goal.
Digital Marketing Strategy
The strategy section of our process outlines exactly how we’ll achieve our client’s goals and objectives, outlined in the previous section. For example, “growing brand awareness” could be a strategy connected to a revenue growth goal because your organization could be struggling because no one has heard of you. Or “improving customer check out experience” can be a strategy to increase ecommerce revenue.
Digital Marketing Tactics
After outlining the strategy, we then determine our tactics. Tactics are the tools we’re going to use to accomplish the strategy. So to follow from our previous post about strategy, a tactic to “grow brand awareness” would be to run display ads on popular websites in the client’s geographic target. Creating an automated email campaign to users who have placed an item in their cart but not completed a purchase would support the “improving customer check out experience” strategy.
Next Steps
The final section of our Digital Strategy are the Next Steps. This is where we outline how the client can implement the Digital Strategy.
Many of our Digital Physical + Strategy clients choose FGM Internet Marketing as their digital marketing partner to implement the strategy, but it’s not required. If the client chooses to move forward with FGM for implementation, the Next Steps gives them a choice of a few options, usually structured by price, as to how we move forward with implementation.
We are very aware of our clients’ cost sensitivity because we’re cost sensitive, too! We want to meet our clients where they are. Implementing the entire strategy at once may not be within a client’s capacity, but that doesn’t mean we can’t implement a few tactics that are likely to get good gains for a smaller cost – what we call low hanging fruit.
In Conclusion
Our goal with the Digital Physical + Strategy is two-fold:
- To learn the most we can about your organization so we can set you up for success
- To create a trusting relationship with our clients based on open communication and mutual respect
Each one of our clients is unique with different goals for themselves and their organizations. To implement the same or similar strategies across all clients is not appropriate nor is it in the client’s best interest.
If you’re ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, contact FGM Internet Marketing today to get started.
