The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide – Denver & Colorado Springs style

The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide – Denver style

First off, let’s just go right ahead and define Digital Marketing, because that’s a term that could mean a million different things to a million different people. 

At Pollinate, we’re looking at your online presence and making sure it is consistent, effective and engaging (another nebulous term, but we’ll get back to that later). This includes social media, websites, sales pages, newsletters, CRM workflows, visual elements & copywriting. From Google Ads to your email signature we want to make sure that the right people recognize and like you the second they e-meet you. 

A digital marketing strategy is the plan for establishing your business and your business’s personality through online channels. The goal is to increase awareness about your business and turn them into raving zombies who consume anything you tell them to.

Create a strategy 

Wanna be real for one quick second? JK I’m pretty much always real and literally can not help myself. But here’s your first nugget of truth – I hate the word strategy. But I actually LOVE a thoroughly developed strategy. Because I love tactics, and I love execution and I LOVE planning, experimenting, measuring, tweaking and repeating until we’ve created the most well oiled marketing machine that we barely have anything to talk about in our meetings besides exchanging high fives and filling our champagne flutes. 

I’m exaggerating, but only kind of. 

When the term “Marketing Strategy” pops up, most people don’t totally know what they mean, but they expect a 102 step process, filled with lingo and fancy doo-dads and technology and HOURS of discussion. That’s why I hate it. 

You know what I love? A stinking plan, I literally have a 4 prong planning approach that runs my life. FOUR ENTIRE PRONGS, that’s how much I love a plan.  

At Pollinate, we define your marketing strategy as your plan for what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. Our primary marketing objective is getting your customers to know you exist, like you and your product, trust that you’re the expert at what you do. The “know, like, trust” funnel is well known, but what we also help you do is develop systems to help you convert your leads faster and get them to purchase from you again-and-again.

Your new Digital Marketing Strategy:

1. Build your buyer personas
2. Establish attainable, data-based goals
3. Audit what’s working. <<< this one is one no one tells you about, let’s do a traffic or lead audit to find out what has driven your favorite clients or customers to your virtual or physical doorstep
4. Identify the digital marketing tools you need to achieve these goals and reach these people
5. Evaluate your existing online marketing channels (web site, email, social media, Google my business, google ranking, client experience etc. – I could go on for hours)
6. Plan your owned media campaigns
7. Identify which platforms and tactics deserve your time and money
8. Monitor, report, optimize, kill (yes, kill)

Building your Buyer personas: 

The very first step is to figure out who we’re talking to and who we want to be talking to. We spend a lot of time chatting with our digital marketing clients, dreaming about where they’ll be in 3-5 years and, most importantly, who they’ll be working with. Then we match that against who they are actually working with and who is actually engaging on their various platforms. 

Buyer personas represent your ideal clients and help us develop messaging and marketing strategies that make these baddies want to hang out with us (by us we mean you and your biz) IRL or online. If there is a large gap between who you’re working with and who you wish you were working with, we work with you and/or your team to help close that gap over the course of our partnership so we work up to our ultimate goals, without disrupting current sales trends.

2) Establish attainable, data-based goals

Your marketing goals need to reflect your business today, as well as your business’ goals for tomorrow. For example, if you’re looking to grow your revenue by 20%, marketing should be driving 50% more marketing leads. However, if your website is currently only converting 10% we probably won’t be able to immediately jump to a 100% lead-form-fill rate. We’ll work together to build an attainable goal and build a strategy that prioritizes what’s working and where the best opportunity is. We won’t waste your time (or ours) on tactics that aren’t converting. But we also won’t neglect the very top of the funnel, or the middle, or the bottom.

3) Audit what’s working: 

Which brings us to… the “research phase”. We’ll help you develop systems and analyze the data to determine what’s working best, how much time it takes you to convert a lead and how much $ each channel and offer is generating. We’ll help you create systems for auditing what you’re spending time on, where people are learning about you and how to maximize all of those dang opportunities. 

At Pollinate, we believe that doubling down on what’s working is WAY more valuable than reinventing the wheel on brand new tactics. Know what’s crazy? I would be willing to bet you $100 that word of mouth is your very best channel. 

I know, I know, I’m offering online awareness, social media, emails – what does that have to do with word of mouth? Why would you hire me if you can just get someone to tell someone to work with you?

Well, bb girl, because I’m not here to waste your time. If every single one of your sales have come from your networking efforts, word of mouth from your bad ass skills, and a built-in audience then why wouldn’t we make that even more effective. I’ll help you build a website that gives your network a way to buy through your website, a email sequence that makes them feel at home and a way for this audience to deepen their relationship with your business on social media. Why spend time building a brand new channel when we haven’t even dipped our toes into what you’ve naturally created?!

No one talks about this step, they don’t want you to know that you already, intuitively know what it takes to build your business. We’re here to help you build your dream business, so we know that what works naturally for you is, naturally, what will work best. What we’re here to do is to help lighten the load while doubling down with our expertise to help you develop an experience for your clients that leads them to an easy “yes” and an even easier “yes, again”. 

4) Identify the digital marketing tools you need to achieve these goals and reach these people

Sick, now we now what who we’re talking to (aspirationally and literally right now), where we’re trying to go with the biz and what has worked up to this point. Let’s get the party started by figuring out the best tools to find our peeps! 

Whether we’re talking about making your website a conversion machine, streamlining your behind the scenes work flows so you’re converting more leads, showing up for relevant leads with Google ads or simply helping you create automations that encourage your existing clientele to spread the word. 

5)  Evaluate your existing online marketing channels (web site, email, social media, Google my business, google ranking, client experience etc. – I could go on for hours)

The thing is, not many people are connecting what they’re doing on social, to ads, to emails. Once again, we want to look at which tactics you’re using and which ones could use a little TLC (I mean, who doesn’t love “Say Yes to The Dress”). 

We’re willing to bet that one link of the chain, or better yet, one slik laden string of the web (heh, get it? web?) isn’t up to the standards that we’re hoping to achieve. We’re here to help maximize every single-ingle opportunity on that chain. But also, minimize pressure on platforms that aren’t resulting in conversions.

Pollinate Marketing is a great example, we are a multiple 6 figure business who deeply values and works harde to compensate their team rfairly- we have a minimal social media presence, a non-existent newsletter experience but a BANGER website content/SEO strategy paired with lead work-flow that converts at an 80% rate and encourages our existing clients to leave a review & refer their besties. After all, dreamy clients know more dreamy clients. We get most of our leads through referrals, but we make sure that they have a social media and web presence that lend legitimacy, while we build workflows that make our leads feel loved well before they make contact with us. 

6) Plan your owned media campaigns:

Let’s start that grand experiment. Before we spend your money with Facebook, Instagram or Tiktok, let’s see what is resonating with your current audience. We’ll develop 10 ideal campaign messages and imagery to see what your OG fans respond to. We know that your current audience is the gateway to your ideal client, so why not use them as our testing ground before we give the ads companies a single-igle dollar. 

7) Identify which platforms and tactics deserve your time and money

Once you’ve posted your content and implemented your new messaging, evaluate what worked, what didn’t and what needs to be tweaked. Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you work through this process: 

• • Which tactic resulted in the most engagement?

• • Which tactic resulted in the most clicks?

• • Which tactic resulted in the most revenue?

• • Were there any things you tried that you simply hated implementing?

• • Are there any members of your audience who you could ask for feedback from?

• • Are there any platforms that outperformed others?

• • What are next steps to turn this into a paid strategy?

• • Have you thought through the experience once a lead clicks your ad and lands…. Where?

• • Is there a series of tactics that would work best to foster your new prospect to a lead, to a customer? Trick question, the answer is always yes. 

Once you’ve analyzed what needs tweaked and which pieces of content were your star performers, you’re ready to launch your campaign!

8) Monitor, report & kill

We often recommend that you let your social media, google ad, or messaging campaign run for a few weeks before making any adjustments – we actually tell you not to even look at it. Admittedly, we often break this rule and at least peek in at performance early on, because we just get so excited to see our little bb ad campaign shine. 

We report on our ad campaigns monthly and check in on them once a week. When you’re analyzing your ads it can be helpful to ask yourself the following questions

• • What is the industry standard for this tactic and am I meeting it?

• • Is this campaign demonstrably contributing to our social media, marketing or business goals?

• • Are my goals still realistic based on the data?

• • How can I double down on the success of this campaign?

• • How can I improve this campaign?

• • Am I targeting the right audience?

• • What is the next phase for this campaign?

You can use these questions to help steer your campaign and your marketing strategy to be sure that you are constantly optimizing your online presence to support your business. If there are particular parts of the campaign that just don’t seem viable, you hated executing or took too much time – Remember, you get to kill it because no campaign or social media platform or marketer can tell you what to do.

Tweaking, adjusting and pivoting is a constant when it comes to a marketing campaign, especially in the early stages, as you learn how to connect with your audience, where to find them and what drives them to buy.