Designing a Digital Blueprint for Your Bottom Line

 by Scott Lambert

Before setting out to do anything, you should have a plan. A blueprint is the plan that contractors, builders, electricians, plumbers, and carpenters use to be sure that their concerted efforts are properly channeled and set out to achieve the same, desired goal. You would not consider building a house without a detailed blueprint to keep everyone on the same page and marching in the same direction.

In the same way, a business should design a blueprint for their online marketing success. And that success should contribute to an increase in profit.

This three-part article will outline the necessary steps and elements to create a blueprint for an integrated online marketing strategy to increase revenue and reduce costs – thus positively impacting your business’ bottom line.

In this article, you’ll learn how to:

•    Set clear, constructive goals for your business
•    Develop a tactical road map to your goals
•    Craft a compelling value proposition
•    Have a persuasive call-to-action message
•    Conduct an online competitive analysis
•    Identify operational impacts to marketing, sales, service and support
•    Measure internet marketing performance

Set Clear, Constructive Goals for Your Business

Most businesses set out to create a website without defining a clear, constructive goal. In most cases, their primary goal is to have an online brochure that can lend legitimacy to their business. However, they have no plan to actively attract qualified site visitors and convert those site visitors to sales-ready leads or customers.

It’s not good enough to just have a website anymore. Rather, it is important that specific and measurable goals are attached to your website. How will you define success? How will you know if your Internet marketing strategy is succeeding or failing?

Before setting out with a new strategy, it is important to set a baseline with existing performance metrics. Identify your current website traffic volume, traffic sources and conversion rates. This information can be found within your company’s financial data, such as your sales closure rate and cost to generate a lead/customer. This information can also be found in your current website’s analytics account. By establishing this baseline, you can measure the impact your changes had on your current statistics.

A business’ goals should also be based on market research. Google provides free tools to identify the online search demand for your product and services. This research can help you better understand how people go about researching and buying your products and services online. By knowing this, you can tailor your strategy around what your ideal prospect is looking for online and how best to engage them.

Develop a Tactical Road Map to Your Goals

Once you’ve set clear and constructive goals, you can align tactics and strategies that will contribute to those goals. If you’re goal is to generate new customer growth, there’s a set of unique strategies made up of specific tactics that will help you move towards that goal. If you’re goal is to establish your company as a thought-leader or industry expert, you’ll need to be sure that your strategies and tactics align accordingly.

Once the strategy and tactics are identified, a tactical road map can outline the sequence of events in different phases or benchmarks. This can help outline timeline expectations and important milestones for collaboration or feedback within the implementation of each step. Below is an example of Xcellimark’s tactical road map for website development.

In part two of this article, we’ll continue to talk about other elements that are critical to your website’s success such as a compelling value proposition and persuasive call to action.