Working methodology

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Abraham Lincoln

Keep in mind, that a good marketer always start with a plan.

The big question is "What do you want to achieve?".

Whatever you would like to achieve, you need to prepare the field. Of course, you don't want to do it and would rather prefer to act directly on your acquisition channel. But if you do in some days, weeks, months, you will realize that you put too much effort into it and you are no exhausted, you don't know when the project will end, you probably have no budget anymore, you will feel isolated within your organization because no one can follow you anymore.

Here are what you have to think about before starting:

  • Your goals.
  • Your audience.
  • Your current situation.
  • Your budget.
  • Website status.
  • Your current marketing strategy.
  • Goal measurement.
  • Suggested online marketing strategy.
  • Milestones.
  • Use tools to follow your working methodology.

Your goals

It is important to set expectations for your new online acquisition strategy. If not how would you define it as a success. Think about it in a 360 degree way. An online acquisition may not bring you straight away what you think, though maybe later on, someone will come to your door and say that they heard about you thanks to this online acquisition channel. That's why your goals should not be thought about purchases only, but about leads, emails, likes, shared also.


Who are you targeting?

You need to define clearly who is your target, where are they leaving, what are their center of interests, what is their age, their revenues... This is what we call personas in marketing. The more precise you are defining them the better it will be. In order to do so the best thing is to ask to your client who are their existing customers and what do they look like. You can also request information from external studies or databases. What are their needs.

What is your current position and what do you expect?

So you are going to invest in an online marketing channel. Ok, but maybe your organization already invested in this channel before. What are those current outcomes. If you are a new comer, what is your potential reach for this market.

Your budget

It is all about budget, neither time or cash or both. You need to clearly express the amount of effort you would like to invest on this new channel so as how much you already invested so far.

Website status

Does the word SWOT rings any bells to you? Investing into an acquisition channel costs money, so you don't want to ruin that because of a buggy website. In this part, we advise you to draw a table such as this one below, where you will list everything that it is positive or negative about your website.


SWOT
Strengths Weaknesses
Opportunities Threats

Your current marketing position

You are for sure, already communicating either offline/online or both. In this part, you need to indicate what you are doing and what is the return you already get back from those actions. The idea is really to put on the table all your actions and see how your new online acquisition is going to fit into this.

Goal measurement

This part refers to the way you are currently measuring/tracking your Return On Investment about your website. The idea here is really to define if you have an analytics strategy or not and to plan how you are going to implement it for your new strategy. The worse thing you can do is to overcome this part. You are going to invest into an online acquisition, so you need to ensure how much you get back from what you invest.

Suggested online marketing strategy

In this part, you will describe carefully how you are going to act. What is your plan. This helps asking you the right questions.

Milestones

You will never get this one correct. But it helps, knowing how you are forecasting this project helps at least to insert it within your agenda. Then in IT, everything is about surprises and things not going according to the plan. The interesting thing about milestones is that it works a bit like a contract. Your client know what are your expectations in terms of time and when they should expect the first impacts to happen.

Check your working methodology with tools

It is good to have a plan, but it is better to ensure if you are applying it. There are many ways to do this but it all depends of how you and your colleagues feel about those tools. For example, using a checklist may be very valuable to you. If you enjoy checklists, please use them as it will ensure that everything has been done before shipping. For your colleagues it may be about a trendy online tool for project management. It all depends, but you need to have tools to check that your work has been done. That's a key success factor.

Last modified: Monday, 27 January 2020, 2:56 PM