Digital Marketing Framework
The digital brand of an industrial business is an essential sales tool and a valuable financial asset. The company’s digital brand defines the perception, awareness, and pre-qualification credibility of the business for existing and potential customers.
The company’s digital brand is the net result of the website, digital marketing programs, blogs, social media activity, mobile apps, e-commerce and all other forms of digital communications. It is essential that all of these digital resources be prioritized and coordinated to accurately communicate the “winning strategy” of the business.
Projex IMC has developed a digital branding framework to help ensure that the website, branding, messaging, and digital marketing investments are aligned with the winning strategy of the business. We have also built an online, DIY, interactive application to assist our clients in developing their winning strategy.
The digital branding framework is illustrated in Figure A below. The overall structure is built around the need to focus the targeted customers, digital brand and marketing investments on the winning strategy of the business.
Figure A
The following is a summary of each step in the digital branding process. Once the winning strategy is defined, the other elements in the process can be developed in a step-by-step method.
Define Your Winning Strategy
The Projex IMC – “Winning Strategy Roadmap” is accessible via a secure portal for an individual or a team. It is an intuitive, proven, step-by-step process with templates, video tutorials, worksheets, and DIY assessments. The entire process focuses your management team on the key information required to define a winning strategy:
• Define the business
• Benchmark the “As Is” situation
• Benchmark performance vs. key competitors
• Define targeted markets
• Define food chains/sales channels
• Define your winning strategy
Define/List Your Targeted Customers and Contacts
Once the winning strategy has been defined, the next step is to convert the targeted markets into targeted companies and specific contacts. This process uses a state of the art sales intelligence database to generate specific targets based on the following sequence:
• Define the SIC, NAICS 2012, or other specific codes of the targeted industry(s).
• Define the size of the targeted companies by head count or revenue
• Define the geographic footprint of the targeted companies
• Define the organizational functions (CEO, COO, VP, etc.) of the targeted personas
• Estimated lifetime revenue/gross profit value of the targeted companies
Define Your Desired Digital Perception
Once the winning strategy and targeted customers are defined, it is now possible to describe the “desired digital brand” of the business. This critical step will outline the key digital marketing strategies – positioning, perception, messaging, SEO/key word phrase priorities and e-commerce requirements.
Define Your Required Digital Footprint
The final step is converting the winning strategy, targeted customers, and desired digital brand into a prioritized, comprehensive, digital marketing footprint. At this point, you have defined the key digital marketing requirements necessary to help your sales team consistently compete and WIN!
Digital Branding Success: A Sales Perspective
There are multitudes of digital marketing tools and tactics available to support your organization’s sales and growth objectives. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to determine which of the many digital marketing tools available is best suited to your current sales situation (visibility, market position, competitive environment, budget, and time restraints). The table below provides a list of proven tools that may come into play. The most effective way to define and prioritize digital marketing investments that offer a reasonable, defensible, ROI is to rank them in terms of their impact on your sales process.
Digital marketing success – from an industrial sales perspective – is achieved when your investments have a measurable impact on sales, to the extent that the value of new business (lifetime value) exceeds expenditures. Initiatives that focus first on optimizing a company’s web presence, and then on acquiring the tools needed to support the sales team’s day to day selling process and competitive requirements for visibility, positioning, and messaging are most likely to achieve a reasonable return on investment. And sales performance metrics (e.g. qualified leads, sustainable growth trends) provide an effective “yardstick” for defining the success of digital marketing investments.
