Step 4: Digital Marketing Roadmap

Troy Scott

Dec '22 (edited) in Getting Started

The Roadmap

Here's what the journey ahead looks like:

Step 4: Developing a Complete Online Strategy

Step 4.1: Getting from Point A to Point B & Mapping Out Your Business

Step 4.2: The Framework / Finding Baseline (Core vs. General KPI's)

Step 4.3: Creating Your Marketing Systems

STEP 4: Developing a Complete Online Strategy

Oftentimes one of the biggest challenges for any business owner is grappling with the paradox of getting stuck working in the business versus working on the business. Generally speaking if you can set up a marketing system that requires minimal in-house management to run it, you’ll be freed up to work on your business instead of in your business.

For me, In the early days I was doing EVERYTHING. Content creation, blogging, video production, managing the PPC buys, and at its peak running over 78 Home & Garden events with staff! I mean everything.

Believe me, it took a few years for me to actually let go of all this stuff. I’m not a control freak, I just wanted it done right and I stressed myself out way more than I needed to.

In retrospect, it worked out, but I did hang on to managing projects way too long, when I absolutely needed to let go of them and get out of the way.

For me personally, one of the single biggest adjustments I made was outsourcing the management of time consuming tasks like content creation, paid traffic management and other “working in my business” roles that kept me from “working on my business” or big picture type thinking activities.

More directly this course is about creating and setting up digital marketing systems that you simply manage for the results you're after. Systems that deliver data, so you, the business owner understands what is actually happening with your marketing efforts.

This puts you in control and allows you to make data driven marketing and advertising decisions.

Understanding your web traffic, your lead flow, how your phone calls are being answered, your sales conversions, your follow ups methods and even managing your reviews by customers.

The automation is the cool part, cause once it's set up you just tweak it from time to time. The implementation on the other hand can be daunting. Especially for business owners who are afraid of change. Many think that their business is running just fine or worse, don’t think they will get left behind by their competitors who are taking action to implement today's incredible marketing tools.

Setting these systems up can be quite valuable, in fact they can actually increase the value of your company. Creating these types of systems can be powerful incentives if you have an exit strategy by acquisition. If your business is profitable and has proven systems that are managing the infrastructure they’re much easier to sell.

If you’re just getting started, these systems don’t need to be super complicated either.

Take websites for example. Today, simple Wordpress themes have eliminated the need to pay expensive programmers. These themes can be cookie cutter or completely customizable and will typically work for any type of business.

Another great technology trend has been the ubiquitous adoption of API technology which connects digital solutions to virtually any other digital solution. This technology has made creating systems easier than ever before. Simply put: API technology allows users to connect applications together and automate workflows via custom scripts.

The upside is that real marketing problems can be solved with thousands of solutions in this brave new world of cloud-based programming.

Take https://zapier.com/ for example. This company has a gigantic library of preconfigured “Zaps” (API scripts) that easily plug into hundreds of other apps that can be configured and activated into systems you may already be running, and many of these Zaps are Free!

This is a great example of what API’s can do for businesses who want to connect marketing solutions together. Heavenly Greens uses a number of "Zaps" to connect our systems. Over the years speaking directly to business owners, I’ve heard consistently the same issue come up over and over that all of this is confusing and overwhelming.

The common roadblock for many business owners is that new technology ultimately means change.

For many this signals a reluctance to let go of control because it's new and unfamiliar to them. The old, “But we’ve always done it this way and it’s working just fine” excuse is a very common response to adding new marketing technologies to their business.

The new reality for just about every small business today is that they must adopt a digital marketing plan in order to compete, get control of their marketing data, and perhaps most important of all, use that data to make better marketing decisions.

What are your thoughts? Share below in the comments.

Ok, lets get to Step 4.1: Getting from Point A to Point B

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