Crafting The Perfect Digital Marketing Roadmap

As digital marketers, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the infinite number of tools at our disposal. Throw the (surprisingly useful) invention of AI into the mix and you might as well give up.

A lot of us reach a point where we've tried...a lot of stuff, and we still don't know what works best. We know that juggling dozens of platforms and campaigns will result in failure, but what should we focus on?

What is worth our time and what wastes our valuable resources?

Or maybe you're just getting started and you're paralyzed by the vast digital landscape. Either way, I have something that will help: a digital marketing roadmap to help you identify goals and target audiences, audit past results, and make a plan. A good plan, inspired by actual data.

In this article, I'm going to walk you through the process I use when developing a digital marketing roadmap for my clients. I'll offer up some helpful tips for how to apply it to your own business, and answer the toughest question in digital marketing: where do I begin?

Where do I begin?

Let's get this one out of the way first. You begin with the end in mind.

You answer the question: what do I want to accomplish and how am I going to measure it?

It's amazing how many marketers do all the marketing things without knowing what they want to achieve or how they will measure success.

I get it. Setting up tracking and attribution and reporting on the results of your campaigns are the least interesting parts of digital marketing (depending on how nerdy you are). But without understanding your goals and KPIs and how your performance measures up, you can't confidently gauge the success of your efforts. And believe it or not, your goal is NOT to convince your boss that the campaign was successful.

Your goal is to actually succeed.

Goals & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Which brings us to the first stop on the digital marketing roadmap.?

At one point in my marketing career, I hated establishing goals. For one thing, I didn't understand how to track the effectiveness of my campaigns, so creating goals felt like a shot in the dark. Secondly, goals and KPIs felt like opportunities to fail. Turns out, I was right. That's exactly what they are! But that's okay. Here's why: the possibility of failure is necessary if you want to fully understand what success looks like for your business.

I love working with clients to help establish clear and measurable goals for their marketing campaigns. Without goals and KPIs, you'll continue spending money and time on ads and other marketing efforts that may or may not bring you any closer to your end goal: a growing, profitable business.

Here are the questions I ask my clients to help identify their goals:

• What is your customer lifetime value?
• Tell me about your profit margins.
• How confident are you that you have Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, WordPress, and your CRM set up and functioning correctly?
• What is your current return on ad spend (ROAS)??
• Are you happy with that number?
• Of all your current marketing efforts, what makes the most impact? The least?

Some of these questions may not be immediately answerable, which provides some homework for the team.

Once we've answered these questions, we can typically draft some clear and measurable goals.

Here are a few examples of goals that we've arrived at:

• ROAS improved from 2.4 to 3.0 by January 1.
• Email open rate improved from 10% to 15% by Q3.
• $70K in sales driven from email campaigns in March.
• 2M ad impressions targeting relevant audiences on LinkedIn next month.
• 30 new marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by Q3.
• 15 new sales qualified leads (SQLs) by Q2.

Remember, for a goal to be great it has to be measurable and it has to have a deadline.

Identify Target Audience

So we've figured out what we want to accomplish. Now we need to make sure we know who our target audience is.

A lot of marketing teams have an idea of who their customer is, but most of the time it comes from their gut, which is really just who they want their customer to be. As digital marketers, there are some excellent resources at our disposal to help us identify who resonates best with our brand. From Google Analytics demographics (who are the people visiting your site) to Google Ads search terms reports (what exactly do your customers type into Google before clicking your ad and purchasing your product) to social media demographics data.

Digging into this will avoid pitfalls down the road (e.g. the wrong messaging targeted at the wrong person).

Audit Past Results

A lot of us have stories in our heads about what works for our brand and what doesn't. Like, maybe Google Ads works. Email doesn't. LinkedIn gets people to our website, but they don't purchase, etc.

The problem is we often go years between audits, while algorithms, the way people use social media and perceive advertising, and the available audience targeting change all the time. At this stage of the digital marketing roadmap (step 3), you'll need to perform an in-depth audit to see where you are actually seeing the best results.

It's also worth mentioning, our data is often convoluted. Were your tracking links working correctly when you sent those emails? Maybe we need to revisit that. Did your Meta ads drive the website traffic that your Google retargeting ads eventually capitalized on?

There are a lot of questions to ask before you make decisions on your media spend and where you allocate your time and resources.

By taking the time to dig into all your past results and double-checking the story you've been telling yourself, you get the opportunity to clear up any misconceptions before you officially begin plotting out the next stage of your digital marketing roadmap.

Develop Engagement Strategy

Now comes the fun part. Think of this as your prototypical marketing plan. You've determined your goals, the KPIs you're going to use to track performance, and you've audited your past efforts to get the full picture of what has worked in the past. It's time to build out a strategy.

Every team has different internal resources, ad budgets, and skill sets. Developing a winning strategy that you can execute with the resources you have available is the most nuanced part of the digital marketing roadmap, as it involves so many variables.

What I can tell you is this: now is the time to put the data you've collected to use.

Here are some important questions to discuss with your team as you develop your engagement strategy:

• Were we operating under any misconceptions before the audit?
• Is our tracking set up correctly and have we tested it?
• What platforms are we going to test and how will our media spend be allocated?
• How will our marketing efforts work together to create one cohesive strategy?
• What portion of our ad spend is going to brand awareness vs. lead gen/sales?
• At what point will we pivot if we are not meeting our goals?

Ideally, every part of this strategy will advance either a primary or secondary goal. It's extremely rare to move the needle for two goals with one campaign, so ask yourself this question: what is the goal of each specific marketing campaign?

For example, a single Meta campaign won't significantly increase brand awareness, drive leads, and boost sales all the same time. It will require three very different campaigns to accomplish that.

In another article, I'll link to an example of an engagement strategy. For now, just understand that your engagement strategy is where the rubber meets the road. It highlights which platforms you plan to use and how you plan to use them. Do you need a new email workflow? It's time to list out your targeting, your campaign structure, your ad groups, and your ads. What are you going to A/B test? What landing pages will you point to? What sort of copy will you use?

You don't have to create all the assets to develop your engagement strategy. You just need to have the vision and be able to articulate it clearly.

Whether you use a doc, a deck, or a spreadsheet (weirdo), just get your plan on paper. And don't forget to tie every marketing effort to a specific goal. If it ain't advancing your objectives, it ain't worth your time.

Plan Budget

Now that your strategy is on paper, it's time to allocate your budget.

Again, this will be different for everyone. But here's what you need to consider:

• Which platforms have worked in the past?
• Which platforms do I want to test?
• How much of our budget should go to brand awareness?
• How much should go to lead gen?
• Are there aggressive sales goals we need to meet?
• If so, do I need to allocate more budget to a bottom-of-the-funnel campaign?
• How long is the sales cycle?
• How will we nurture the leads we earn?
• What is the minimum amount of time we need to test a platform before killing it?

The most important thing is, you guessed it: that you understand your goals and that your budget aligns with them.

If you have a clear understanding of what you need to achieve and which platforms and marketing efforts tend to be most effective at driving results for your business, you can back your way into the answer while still allocating a small budget toward testing new platforms.

Timeline

We're almost done! You've identified your goals and your target audience, you've audited your past results, you've used this data to develop a strategy, and you've carefully thought through how to best allocate your ad budget.

Last but not least, we need to set a timeline.

I'll be honest with you, this is my least favorite part of the digital marketing roadmap. It forces us to sit down and write something that will probably change a dozen times. But you need a timeline to keep everyone on track.

Here's how it might look:

August 13 - September 21: Create advertising assets, create lead gen download, develop landing page, write email copy, set up email workflow.

September 21 - October 1: Begin organic posting, teasing upcoming new products.

October 1 - October 14: Write ad copy, build out ad campaigns on all platforms.

October 14 - November 1: Take ads live, evaluate early performance, report on findings, if any.

November 1 - November 14: Make minor tweaks to campaigns, create first month's report, analyze performance by platform and campaign.

November 14 - December 14: Continue optimizing campaigns, offer recommendations for budget reallocation, report on email performance, site performance, and conversion rates.

December 15: Christmas campaign goes live.

...

Don't be afraid to adjust on the fly. For example, the Google Retargeting campaign might outperform everything and you decide to turn off the Meta retargeting campaign after three weeks. The email campaign might be a bust and we spend a few days rewriting the whole thing, which pushes back the third monthly report.

Without a timeline, you end up doing a little bit of everything all the time, and that results in slow, slow progress.

Summary

I hope this is helpful as you navigate the ever-expanding world of digital marketing. As a freelance consultant and digital marketer, this is one of my favorite projects I get to do with clients. Digital marketing roadmaps provide marketing teams with a flow of energy pointing in one direction. It removes the guesswork. It puts the whole team on the same bus, going in the same direction, striving for the same goals, and there's nothing more powerful than a group of people who fully understand what they're trying to accomplish.