Beyond Vanity Metrics: Marketing That Drives Real Business Results, ft. Corey Morris

In this episode, marketing strategist Corey Morris joins us to unpack why so many companies feel like they’re spinning their wheels with content and campaigns—without seeing real business results. He explains how marketing often gets lost in the weeds of tactics and vanity metrics, and shares how his START Planning Framework brings clarity, accountability, and strategy to marketing efforts. If you’ve ever felt like you’re busy with marketing but not sure if it’s working, this one’s for you.

🧠 What You’ll Learn:

• Why focusing on tactics before strategy leads to wasted time and budget.
• The problem with reporting on vanity metrics and how to tie KPIs to actual business goals.
• An overview of Corey’s START Planning Framework:
  • Strategy – Align goals with business outcomes.
  • Tactics – Select and evaluate marketing channels based on your funnel.
  • Application – Identify and prep the assets you’ll need.
  • Review – Build meaningful reporting systems.
  • Transformation – Align your team and schedule your plan for consistent execution.
• How to identify and fix resource gaps before they derail your plan.
• Tips for small businesses and solopreneurs on using strategic planning with limited resources.

💡 Memorable Quote:

“Doing tactics in the absence of a strategy is one common issue. Another is reporting on KPIs that aren’t mapped to revenue—and that’s when CEOs say, ‘I’m spending all this money on marketing but don’t see the impact.’”

🔗 Resources Mentioned:

• Corey’s book: The Digital Marketing Success Plan
• Downloadable tools at: thedmsp.com/blueprints

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Transcript

In many cases, people have been doing creating content long enough that they don't
remember why they're doing like seven social media posts a week and four blog posts
a month. And really, or why they're going through this list of SEO best practices
and implementing these things on their site. You get really down into the weeds and
really into the details. Those are all not, those are good things. Those aren't bad
things. And there probably are things that are going to be in your plan. But if
you don't know the what and why of why you're doing them and how they're going to
have an impact or to the article I just published in my newsletter this morning
ahead of our conversation about the challenge of we report on metrics like quantity
of leads or how many leads we generated in a month. But the real question should
be on quality of leads and what happens to those leads after we generate them. And
so there are a lot of different, so doing tactics in the absence of a strategy is
one common one. Another common one is reporting on vanity metrics or marketing KPIs
and not having those mapped out well enough to what the business outcome is in the
revenue driver. So that's another one where an owner or a CEO of a business will
come to me and say, I've been spending all this money on marketing, but I can't
see the impact on our business. I get these reports, these dashboards that show
we're getting more traffic or we're getting more engagement for our brand, but I'm
not seeing a return on that investment on the other end to show what we're getting
for what we're putting into marketing. So there are a number of different, you know,
and then you get into the classic marketing versus sales debates on whether those
leads were qualified or not, or you're not looking at things like lifetime value,
or very short -sighted bottom of the funnel metrics versus understanding how your
funnel works as a whole. So there are a whole different number of challenges. Those
are just a few examples. And those are reasons people write off marketing, think it
doesn't work, doesn't work for them, or their industry, Or feel like they got burned
and that's and and we have the power to measure this when it's online and to know
It's not easy always to measure it and connect all those dots, but That's really a
frustration. I share and sometimes sympathetic about I wish I could Reverse time in
some cases and get back those tens of thousands of dollars somebody spent on you
know Maybe the Google ads which maybe we're gonna do in our strategy, but with the
right guidance and goals and metrics along the way to make sure it's actually is
working versus it's just something we throw out there. - So I feel like when
marketers, like agencies, they're encouraged to get more sophisticated by showing a
lot of those like KPIs and having the nice little, you know, dashboards to show
that they're actually getting results. So what is the distinction? Like how do you
know if you're working with an agency and they are going to give you some KPIs,
whether those are actually gonna be tied to business outcomes or they're just gonna
be like vanity metrics? Like how do you make that distinction? - Yeah,
my hope is that from the start, you have some deep conversations about how your
company makes money with the agency or with your team that you hire or whomever
when you're starting any type of marketing effort. And hopefully it's not one of
those situations like almost like when you go to a party and you meet somebody and
you forgot their name that you can't ask them their name. The next time you see
them or two weeks later or whatever, I hope that it's not a situation where it's
like We didn't ask those questions or didn't get asked those questions. And now it's
too late. We're further down the road and they should know, um, that type of
scenario. But ultimately understanding how businesses make money. I started my career
in SEO and I was a deep SEO nerd and I wanted to just do SEO,
right? And so getting into things that are on the business side of my client side
of things that are outside of SEO felt messy. Sometimes there's politics attached.
Sometimes you go through data that's not connected if their CRM is a mess or their
sales team or the CEO doesn't understand what you're talking about. There's a lot of
messes that it's easy for me to sit behind my dashboard and say, "I did my SEO
job. I'm not responsible for the rest of it if the website's not converting or the
sales team's not actually closing the sales or whatnot. I learned the hard way that
I still get fired even if all of my graphs and metrics are up into the right and
everything's green. They're not ultimately making money or can't it can't answer the
question or fill the gap or connect the dots then someone somewhere is eventually
gonna end my contract no matter how how well it's going and going. It's
uncomfortable if you're a deep subject matter expert, if you're an introvert, if
you're really into your nerdery, and then now you have to almost be a more of a
business consultant and problem solver to get out of your silo and to help them fix
their own challenges. It's not always the most comfortable place to be, and it's not
comfortable for an agency. An agency contracts often scope for that. And so some of
the things of how that world works, unfortunately, hold us back when it comes to
the reputation of agencies or even people who get hired into great roles,
but can't really bridge some of the cultural things or even dysfunctional things
within organization. And so your solution to that was your start planning framework,
right? So could you maybe give like a super brief overview of what that framework
looks like and then we can dive in a little more with like practical steps and
tactics afterwards? - Yeah, so there's five steps. It's an acronym called start. So
naturally you could probably guess that the first one is strategy as we have to get
that right. And in that, There are a few steps in there where we're doing some
auditing, we're getting all on the same page to understand what we have. But most
importantly, the last step within the strategy phase is getting aligned on goals and
quantifiable goals and making sure those are deep enough goals that connect to the
business outcomes. From there, then that's the lens we look through for all the
other steps because now we know what quantifiable goals we have. Now, we can look
at tactics, which is the the T and put every tactic on the table. We know how
many people we need, how many leads or how many e -commerce sales or how many
donations if we're a non -profit or whatever our development goals might be and to
work through that and go evaluate any channels and platforms to see where we can
align those with our funnel and go get the numbers that we need in terms of reach.
Then it goes even faster because then we get into what I call application for the
A. This is looking at all the assets and where we need to apply the strategy based
on a lot of tactics that we're going to put into our plan. And so that's, do we
need to create ads? What kind of content do we need to create? Do we need an
overhaul of our website to be ready to invite people to this party? We don't want
the website to not be able to engage properly with our target audiences.
The R is review and that's really it's about reporting, but it's bigger than that
and making sure that we have connections to CRM or some of those other business
data points. So we don't have a dashboard that's just a bunch of anti -metrics like
we talked about. And the final T is for transformation. This is where the whole
thing comes together. This is where we block out the resources we need. This is
where we put everything on a schedule, we balance having milestones for adjusting and
having some agility in the process, but also staying focused so we don't get busy
and put this on the shelf two months in because some other initiative came up.
Okay. Yeah, that's a pretty good comprehensive step -by -step, so thank you for that.
So yeah, it's kind of like to go phase by phase and then like dig in and and ask
questions about it. So, like to start with for the strategy phase. So,
what do you feel like is the most commonly overlooked for people who try to
implement this strategy phase, especially for people who haven't like used your
methods before? Yeah, I think it's easy to make assumptions of,
and to hold on to things that, again, maybe you've been doing for a long time, and
so you assume that they're working.
I'm not saying that we're gonna blow up everything and that your marketing hasn't
been working at all, but there's a reason why we're doing this. And so getting
anybody in the room and everybody from a stakeholder perspective, from the top down
where we can from the C -suite or ownership to the people actually who will be
doing and implementing marketing and even the resources that are needed, like web
developers or content creators and people who are on the team who will be supporting
digital marketing even if they're not necessarily responsible for the performance of
it, is important and that doesn't always happen in fact
way too many times there's not alignment or we're saying the same words but we mean
different things sales and marketing people are talking about leads in two different
ways and and or you don't have someone who is ultimately responsible for giving you
the budget like a CEO a CFO or an owner who's not in the room to really
understand months later what they're getting for that budget so getting people in the
room and not just getting them in the room but getting them to agree on what the
goals are and to connect those dots from the start is important because then you
can always come back to that when we get distracted by all the shiny objects out
there or the new AI thing over here or we're going to this trade show or this
event just popped up or look at that competitor, when we're distracted down the
road, we can always come back to that and say, "Okay, we've defined this goal that
we all agreed on, does doing something or that outside thing change our goal in any
way and to keep us from being distracted? Yeah, that's important. And so once you
get down from the strategy phase into the tactics phase, yeah, my big question with
that was, okay, well, we've identified, you know, why we're doing this,
right? We've got our overarching goals. Now we need to pick whether or not we're
gonna go on a trade show circuit, or we're gonna do emails, or we're gonna do some
kind of ads. And like, how do you know how many different tactics you need to come
up with in order to achieve your goals? - Yeah, if you didn't do it in the
strategy phase as part of your goal planning, then You definitely need to do it
here in the sense of mapping out your funnel and understanding your funnel or
customer journey. How many people do you need to get to the bottom? But this is
where we can go use research tools, whether it's keyword planner or some of the ad
planners that are native in platforms like Facebook or Google or use third party
tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs and other things to show how people are searching and
where they are and how many of them are there or how many queries or searches
there are and where they are. And it's not good enough to just look at the raw
numbers or your personas, but we have to look at intent as well. What are they
looking for? Where are they seeking and what phase are they in and how do they
move through that funnel? And it's not always just a straight line. So
This is the time where it's cheap to go experiment and test because you're not
actually running an ad yet. We're just doing some of the research and we're looking
at the numbers and we're looking at how others are doing it out in the marketplace
who might be our competitors or competing for that same audience or attention. This
is the really important part where if you know your funnel and know it well or
know the multiple variations of it, how people enter it. Great. Now we can map
those tactics out that will help support it. If you don't, this is a great point
of looking at all the many ways that somebody may engage with your brand from first
understanding that they have a problem or not even knowing they have a problem and
they're out there looking or you find them or they engage with your content all the
way down to "I'm in buy now" mode. Get out of my way, let me fill out that form
or talk to somebody today and all the steps in between. So getting that lined out
is important. I've actually got a kind of a cheat sheet tool for funnel mapping,
which I can point to the URL later for anybody who gets stuck really in that phase
as well. So is it kind of like you're making a a journey funnel,
but then you're looking at up until now, how have people been finding us?
How have we been moving people between stages towards actually buying? And then
you're kind of like layering onto that, like outside tactics. So I guess that's
maybe the question is like, are you looking at the ways you've already been doing
marketing kind of within that funnel and how it's been converting people and then
deciding whether to like double down on some of those strategies or to pull in
other ones. Is that, that's correct? - Yeah, absolutely. We wanna, we wanna keep the
things that are working, understand what's working, not bias against things maybe
'cause I personally don't like much to say, I don't like book or whatever, but, you
know, so we never really touched it or whatever. It's, we got to understand that we
know what our numbers need to be and we need to go overlay that with how many
people in our target audience are in each of those sources, those channels, those
platforms, and how do they contribute to getting into our funnel to engage them?
So you're exactly right. It's a mixture of both what what we've been doing, what's
working, while also probably cutting out some, you know, if there's any waste in
there that we've been spinning on to get in front of the wrong people, that's as
important as making sure we're also targeting the right people. And what other
channels and platforms and opportunities do we have to further support that? If we
know that we need to, you know, simple math of, you know, what our conversion is
our historical conversion rate and things like that. If we know that we need to
have a thousand, engage a thousand people a month and it gets down to the bottom
of the funnel for us to close three deals and you trickle that through.
Well, if Google only offers 50 people a month and Facebook only offers 10,
LinkedIn offers 20, we're not going to get there and get the numbers we need. And
so this is where we can really truly apply that and understand where our
opportunities are and where those traffic sources are and what it will cost. We can
project what it will cost in terms of ad dollars and even soft costs in terms of
creating the content and committing the resources we need to get there.
So at this stage where you're comparing the different tactics against each other,
some of the things you're looking at are like, you know, what have you already been
doing and how much is a new thing going to cost like once you determined it would
be enough to get you the the traffic or conversions you're looking for and then um
you know the I guess the soft cost of how much time and effort you're gonna have
to put into it so like how many different tactics do you evaluate do you when
you're working with clients do you just have your preferred methods, like, okay,
we're gonna look at what you're doing already, then we're gonna add an SEO, or
like, do you just keep out, I guess, how far do you go to keep thinking of
different potential marketing channels before you're like, okay, this is good enough,
let's just move on to the application phase. There's like a million different ways
to do marketing, right, like there's always a better tactic. Yeah, we want to put
everything possible on the table. So in my agency specifically, we specialize in
search, both SEO and paid search and Google ads and whatnot.
But as I mentioned with the examples before, social media is a big part of that,
email marketing and automation and lead funnels and flows and programmatic and
remarketing. There's so many different things just digitally plus how that integrates
with events and traditional media and the offline marketing world as well.
So yes, it can almost be overwhelming and limitless. And that's why it's so much
easier to take a week to process through what's out there and the opportunities and
how they work together versus spend six months just turning something on and testing
it and hoping it works. So yeah, that's an excellent point. And in some cases it's
gonna come down to what you're comfortable with, what your risk analysis is, how
much your budget allows you to test. But hopefully my hope and typical goal at the
end of this phase is to have as solid a projection as you can get of how much
it's gonna cost for each of those you want to get. And so if you're in a very
competitive space, and the keywords maybe that you need a bid on or the content you
have to create is massive to get ranked or to get your ad out there, you know,
if it's $60 a click and your conversion rates 2%, and so we're talking about a
huge investment to get, you know, leads, well, It's fine if you're selling something
for $15 ,000 or $100 ,000 versus selling a $30 product on your e -commerce store.
So it's very different numbers and goals and understanding those is important because
I think you were kind of getting to that a minute ago about that being kind of a
filter that we have to look through to understand, to make sure that we're not
going out and just picking things because our audience is there but picking things
that work financially connected to those goals. And so when you're going through this
initial strategy tactics phase with clients or just with people that you've advised
to do this process through with your book,
like how long does it typically take to map all this out? Especially since you
mentioned like testing, like is that when you say you're testing these things before
you really go out and implement it, do you mean like you're just looking up
research and numbers from industry data or do you mean you're like actually running
like a small test or something to see if something's going to be viable in that
company? That's a great question. I'm glad you asked for clarification on that. So
I'm all about getting in and out of the planning process without implementing things
and getting tempted to do so, because then we're kind of planning and implementing
and testing and then like a year went by and we never really got it all
documented. So I like to get through the initial planning, the start planning
process. When my agency implements it, typically with clients, it's about a 90 day
process because we leave room for back and forth and feedback and to collaborate
with each other through those phases and not rush it. But for people who have
implemented it based on, you know, just taking it straight out of the book, we're
taking slices of it maybe and adding it to supplement a process that they go
through or already have in place. I mean, you could do some of these things in a
day and make sure that you do the research. But it's about planning and not doing
yet. So even when you get to the assets phase, it's tempting to be like, I'm going
to go design that first flight of ads or I'm going to go create whatever. But this
is about getting your plan in place, even if you already have marketing running and
this is going to reshape what it looks like for the next year to do so.
Now coming out of it, you may say, and it's important to say, and I'm skipping
ahead into that transformation phase a little bit, but in your plan, having specific
intervals that that you're gonna measure out, whether that's monthly, quarterly,
weekly, daily, depending on how much volume you're doing and making sure you have a
big enough sample size. But there are things to make sure it's validating and
working according to how you researched and projected it would and where to make
adjustments to your plan as you go. - Okay, that makes sense. And so let's move on
to talking about the tactic space?
Oh, wait, hang on. Okay, we talked about tactic space. Okay, so let's move on to
talking about the application phase. So this is where you're looking at the assets
you need to create before you actually launch your plan.
Yeah, because there's nothing worse than having this plan ready to go,
and then you're like, "Oh crap, I got to go create all this stuff or make it too
big or too small." So if you know, for example, like, you know, display ads or are
going to be part of the plan based on the tactics that you just outlined, then
this is how the place to outline exactly what your needs are.
Make sure that your brand messaging gets brought in here and that you have all the
things you need to create it. So again, like I said just a moment ago, we want to
resist the temptation to go start creating something here, but we want to in our
plan know exactly when we're done with the plan, how we're going to quickly create
the initial, go -to -market things that we need to create. So that could be content,
that could be everything from web content, evergreen content to blog posts or
articles or what you're putting out on social and how that all works together or if
you're writing a book or you have a podcast or whatever it might be, how that
content is going to support the plan and to make sure that you have a solid
schedule for it or cadence for it and you have the resources lined out to be able
to create it. And same thing with your website to make sure it's ready to go. So
this is identifying those so that you don't find them When you've got the plan
ready and then you're like, well, okay, well, I guess we can't start the plan We've
got to the end of the planning process But we got all these holes in our content
or we don't have people ready to go and queued up to create it Okay, so when
you're working with a company through this process How are you identifying some of
those potential like gaps or pitfalls in the plan? Like how are you making sure
that there are enough people dedicated to, let's say, making the right number of
blog posts, or that there's enough people dedicated to creating and managing and
writing the copy and managing the ads and stuff like that.
How are you communicating on a practical day -to -day level with that company to
ensure that all of those pieces aren't in place and that people are committed to
them. - Yeah, if we hadn't hit the point yet in the process, we're gonna hit it
right here because if it's a brand that is already used to creating and generating
massive amounts of quality content, then this shouldn't be as hard for them. It's
just gonna be fine -tuning what they're doing and making it align with what the
goals are, maybe giving it a little bit more purpose. If they are not creating
content or it's been years since they've touched their website or they've not done
any types of ads like this before, then this is going to be a new discipline and
a new investment that they're going to have to figure out and get those resources
aligned. I worked years and years ago with a national restaurant chain who we
devised this amazing just SEO specific specific strategy and we arrayed and launched
it and then we get to the point where we started submitting requests to the IT
team who managed all things for the website and after they didn't get anything done
for a couple months on that list and stopped responding, finally the director of
marketing pushed harder and found out that they weren't going to touch anything for
six months because they were totally booked up on a an initiative. So that we found
that out too late, but it would have been nice to understand that or find other
solutions, whether we could work with them or work around them or help get things
reprioritized. And that's just one example of where this can go wrong.
If you know, we're not, we don't have our resources lined up or committed to an
understand what those costs are or if those aren't, you know, it's a combination of
whether that's internal resources, external resources. I've written about how SEO isn't
just accomplished by people with an SEO title, but I need content people.
I need web developers. If you don't have budgeting for that or don't understand or
have them lined up with priorities and they're busy, then it's hard to have your
plan go at the speed that you want it to go if you're held up by one of those
resources. Maybe somebody's going on for parental leave for a couple months and you
just watched your web developer or your copywriter walk out the door and you don't
have another solution in place, then that's going to definitely impact the timing of
implementing your plan. So it kind of feels like the tactics and application phase
are kind of tightly intertwined at that point because while you're coming up with
tactics, like before you decide on that and start mapping out. Oh yeah, we needed
this 100 blog posts. Like you would have to know whether or not you have like a
web developer on hand or a content creator to create that. So I guess like how do
you like manage that or like make sure that you
are asking the right questions at the right time in the process so that this is
like as efficient as possible when you're creating this and getting information from
people? Yeah, definitely. And it also goes back to what the goals we set and the
financial metrics as well in the strategy phase because we know what our margins
should be and if we know that we're in a good place if we hit our targets with a
Google ad, for example, But it all just went out the window because of the cost of
who we have to pay to run the Google ads that might have gotten missed if we just
started doing it until later. We're like, well, we thought we were making money for
every ad click and conversion that we got, but we're actually losing money because
we're having to pay this other entity to do this. Some of those hidden things can
be surfaced at this point too, to make sure that we're not going and spinning all
of our margins now on the resources to make it come to life. And that's where we
can look at whether it's, who our resources are, or other creative ways to get it
done without having that being landmine that we step on toward the end.
- And when you're doing this process, do you aim for any particular ratios of ROI
to the amount of investment that you have to put in? - Those should be custom to
every client, but that's definitely something we have to know. In many cases,
I'll look at a paid search campaign that's got a return on ad spend goal,
but my question or challenge there is, okay, that's great if you got 12 to one
ROAS or an 8 to 1 or 4 to 1 or whatever, but does that take into account agency
fees or the cost of your team's time to manage it? Do you get a holistic 360
-degree view of what the all -in cost of it is, not just the ad platform or the ad
cost, and sometimes that's surprising when we do all the full math and see that we
thought we were making money and now we're losing money. So maybe that needed to be
16x or 20x and is that even attainable in this channel to begin with?
So there's a lot of really good questions that come in there. Yes, there are
probably, there are always, you know, data points we can find some benchmarks based
on historical for a company or industry wise, but matching that up with what's
acceptable and what our minimums are or our goals are is really important to keep
in mind because it can get expensive fast without us doing the math. So when you're
doing that math, what are some of your favorite places to go to make sure that
you're getting the right industry benchmarks that are most likely to actually pan out
in real life? Yeah. So I have some clients who do their own research studies,
whether they have their own research team or they partner with an outside first
-party data research study provider. That's kind of the holy grail is when we can
own the industry research and they've invested in it. But that's not realistic for
everybody, and that's not a fast overnight thing to have. And so when we go through
this process, we will always want to tap into industry sources. And so if they're a
member of a trade association or other sources that have done the research,
it's out there quantifiable and we can trust it, that's where we wanna start in as
many cases as we can. In other cases, we'll also, and also match that up with
internal metrics of, okay, we've gotten to this point in our, you know,
company's growth with this profit margin and really to get into overall business
growth metrics and make sure that we don't get missed as the marketing team of
hearing what they are and seeing how our metrics and our performance can line up
with that and impact that too. So in some cases, it's already defined that the
company is going to grow 30 % this year, no matter what. and marketing needs to
support that, and then we can go work backwards off of that. In other cases, it
may seem impossible, and we've got to go look at those outside sources, but
hopefully a combination of as many different data points as you can get before you
drill down into the weeds of an AHRF or an SEM rush or something like that in a
channel like SEO to see how SEO ladders up to that. Mm -hmm.
Okay, so the next phases of the plan are to review and then the transformation
phase. So in the review phase, you're building the system,
you're to manage and measure the success and then creating all of your reporting
systems so that you have that documentation, I assume, and then you're making making
sure that everybody's aligned on these key performance indicators. So I was curious
about like how this phase actually looks,
like how many specific documents do you end up having for a particular company to
have like spreadsheets and like action plans written out? Like how much documentation
do you end up with? Yeah, in the review phase Yeah,
I'm we talked about earlier of not just having the dashboard or you know, or now
the box like GA4 report That you're gonna use but making sure that you're connected
into CRM or ERP or e -commerce data Some of the things out of the box that you
know GA4 or even third -party dashboards and software doesn't report on are some of
the more customer unique metrics of how you look at ROI. They don't know what ROI
is out of the box because they don't know what I get paid as maybe a member of
the marketing team. And nor should they, but I mean, understand the holistic ROI of
a marketing effort against the budget requires some more data points. And So,
to answer the other part of the question about what kind it was this looked like,
well this could be messy because it may have to be sketched out in a schematic or
in pivot tables and things like that if our systems aren't currently talking to each
other. And in most cases, they're not. And in some cases, Google Analytics will tell
you certain things if you don't get it configured a certain way and you can't get
the data back if you weren't capturing it from the start. And so, the Reporting
systems and the whole holistic way to measure ROI is important in that review phase
and then the transformation phase takes those aspects, takes all the tactics,
it documents the goals and to your point, it could be many documents. It could be
150 page Google doc or Word doc. It could be a deck,
it could be slides, it could be printed on a hard copy or ultimate plan with the
resourcing and with everything that you're doing. But whatever format, I have a
sample outline in the book, but whatever format you have it in, it needs to be
something that is central, that people can come back to, that you can remind people
when someone walks by and does what I call a CEO drive by, it's like, "Hey, to
the marketing team, have you thought about this audience?" Okay, well, maybe that
wasn't our plan, and we didn't talk about it during the start planning process.
Probably a good idea. So then we can say, okay, time out. That audience isn't in
our plan. Do we need to take a step back and do a little microcosm version of it,
do the research and evaluate it, and see if we should add that target audience? And
if so, do we have new additional budget to reach them, or do we need to reallocate
budget and priorities that we've already got set here? What happens sometimes is
those types of, I call them trigger events where somebody said,
"Let's go do this," or, "We're launching this new product," or, "The sales team's
doing this new offer," or, "We're going to this new event that we've not gone to
before." Those are internal things, but they're external things too, like Google
changes algorithm. Everybody's abandoning Twitter. People are going to do platforms.
AI is disrupting everything. A new competitor emerged that we need to account for.
Any one of those reasons that might make you want to adapt your plan and your
priorities is an important moment. If you don't have this document in a way that
you can come back and revisit it, whether it's digital, whether it's paper, whether
we could sit down in a room look at it and say, "Here are our priorities on what
we're doing." If it's not concise enough to be able to do that, then you're going
to have a challenge or it's just going to be put on the shelf and you're going to
get distracted and change the plan without literally changing the documented plan.
>> One thing I'm curious about is you've talked about what this looks like in
medium -sized or larger companies where you have like content teams and resources and
multiple layers of management and you're sending out like industry reports or you're
part of trade associations. What does it look like kind of on the opposite side for
like a smaller company, like either like a micro company that's kind of like closer
to just being an entrepreneur to like just small teams in general, like in the
dozens or less of employees.
When employees, when they're implementing your start planning process, like how might
the system look different for them and like what are some kind of tips you have
for them? Yeah, so in smaller organizations, and I can say all this from experience
too, from on my growth journey and everything, is you're wearing more hats. So
naturally, if you're wearing the marketing hat, but you're also wearing the owner hat
and the CFO hat, right? So you know what the trade -off is or maybe don't,
and this is where you need to dig into this and do some of this research to
understand the difference between dollars invested in marketing and dollars invested in
that building or that new machine or an inventory, and understand how these things
play out in your business and in the first dollars that you're spending or early
growth dollars and how those align. The last thing you want to do is go put $5
,000 into Facebook that just went out the window. If you didn't fully vet it and go
through enough of a research process and making sure that your tactics were the
right ones or that you weren't just listening to one person who said, "Just do this
one thing and I promise it'll work," and then it doesn't work because you didn't
look at it holistically to understand that.
It's a great process and it may even go faster because if you wear all those hats
and you can make these decisions and you don't have some of the company politics
and dynamics of bigger organizations, it can help you set your goals and get unstuck
as in marketing that might only be like this percentage of your day or that thing
in the back of your mind that you know you need to spend more time on but you
didn't have a plan to hold yourself accountable and it's always two in the morning
that you're creating those social posts or whatever it might be when you get to the
end of your day versus having it scheduled and be part of your day in a way that
it's not nagging at you or feeling the guilt that you didn't post this week.
Okay. And I, yeah, I'm curious about also the, the,
the industry benchmarking or the previous benchmarking when you may be like lower
resourced or a smaller company, like what might that look like? And do you have any
like tactics or tips that people can use to make sure that they're getting like as
close as possible to, you know, accurate benchmarking if they have kind of those
limited resources? Yeah. So, there are a lot of great kind of free tools there than
some of the tools that are, you know, in the 20 to 50 to $100 a month range that
you're going to use for more broader things. So, I think I've mentioned earlier, you
know, some of the search marketing specific ones like AHRFs or SEMrush,
which will give you a lot of search metrics and keyword data and allow you to
drill down in ways there. All of the tools are the platforms where you can run ads
from LinkedIn to Facebook or Meta to Google have their own ad planners and they'll
allow you to slice and dice some of the data and do research that way too. Those
are kind of channel specific and platform specific. But more broadly, there are
things like Word Stream has some good data that they share, similar web and other
tools, which will have free layers that you can get, and you can subscribe again.
It's more nominal than going to some of the big Forester or Gartner or other More
corporate feeling Data resources as well. So there there's a wide range and there's
a lot of third party that you can do that will be Good enough for where you are
in this phase and and then you can invest deeper when you get to a phase where it
makes sense And it's justified At a corporate level, but there are a lot of great
starting points and tools out there from free to to pretty cheap, tied to software
or tied to industry. And especially if you're e -commerce, there are so many
different metrics and providers and an email marketing benchmarks from the different
email platforms as well on how your performance should stack up against others and
you can segment by industries in many places too. - Okay, that's very helpful.
When you get into the final phase of your start process,
that's the transformation phase. So that's where you're scheduling all of these
different tactics and creating an actual calendar.
I'm curious, like, do you have any favorite, like, planning methods or software or
spreadsheets that you use to create this kind of calendar and make sure that
everybody stays aligned on it and can see what they're supposed to be working on?
Yeah. So there are a number of great project management or planning tools out there,
things from base camp that's been around forever.
My agency has used teamwork and we're actually migrating to ClickUp right now,
which is another resource planning project management platform that allows us to
holistically do that, you know, for individual clients, but as well as ourselves.
And when it comes to content, you know, if you've already got social media planning
tools, email planning tools, I mean, use what you already know and you're familiar
with if those are robust enough. But if you need to get outside of that and have
ways to engage other people and have resources blocked out and assignments made.
That's where you may have to get out to a project management tool as well, like a
base camp or whatnot, or Trello is one of my personal favorites too. Okay. And so,
for your process kind of as a whole, are there any like pitfalls that people fall
into when they're trying to implement this process that we haven't kind of covered
already? - Yeah, if you don't resist the temptation to start doing while you're in
the middle of planning, that can derail the whole thing. If you don't have enough
buy -in at the right levels for everybody who needs to implement it, that will
probably cause some tension or issues later. If you aren't familiar enough with some
of the subject matter and you don't take a step back to go dig into how LinkedIn
works or if this is all brand new to you, probably need to understand it and not
let things go over your head going through the process because then you'll be
frustrated later if you don't understand why it's not working or why it's not
turning out the way you thought it would.
And if you've documented it, if we touched on this could be under documents or
spreadsheets and things. If you don't have a document in a way that you can come
back to and revisit, you're at bigger risk of two months in getting distracted and
not coming back to it. And then you just keep chasing things throughout the year.
And then you look back and a year is gone. And you're like, what happened to the
plan? Oh, we didn't follow it. So we can't really measure, we can't judge whether
it worked or not, because we went over here and then chased this. And then we did
that. And so making it actionable is important. Okay,
makes sense. Yeah. And so as we're wrapping up, I just like to shine a spotlight
on you and your company. So is there anything you're working on, any resources you'd
like to share with the audience? Yeah. So if you want to find out anything and
everything about the start planning process, or to get the quick link over to Amazon
for the the book. The title is the Digital Marketing Success Plan. That would be a
long domain, so I've shortened that to the dmsp .com. So you can find out about the
start planning process there. Get the link to Amazon if you're interested in picking
up the book. I've got some additional resources, including the funnel planning
worksheet for your audience at the dmsp slash blueprints.
So make sure you go see that domain. You won't get any sales pitch. There's no
hard sales tactics coming at you if you wanna download those tools or go pick up
the book. And if we can be helpful there, you can contact me or my team through
that website. Or if you're interested in the agency side of things, my agency is
Voltage, and you can find us at voltage .digital. All right. Well, I really
appreciate this chat, Cory. You shared some really good insights. Yeah, I enjoyed our
conversation. Thanks so much.