Getting Started

• Define your business goals, whether it’s to increase awareness of your brand among your prospective, make a sale, increase leads, or enroll students into a program.  
• Outline your target audience by diving into their demographics and potential motivations to convert. 
• Evaluate existing marketing channels and what past data you have access to from them (i.e. organic social media pages and past ad accounts). 
• Analyze data and reporting including website analytics, organic social media channel performance, and conversion data you can pull from your CRM if you use one. 
• Collect brand messaging and visual assets including logos, photos, and past ads you have used to establish future creative direction for your marketing campaigns. 
• Set a realistic initial budget knowing you can always build off of it. 
• Develop an integrated marketing activation plan that creates a full-funnel strategy. 

Building an Effective Marketing Plan

• Implement a full-funnel strategy through paid, organic, and thought leadership channels to tell a full story of your business and create a customer journey. 
• Find the right channel mix and activate the right creative in those channels, applying your budget appropriately based on your audience makeup. 
• Refine your targeting strategy based on the channels you’re using and the capabilities of those channels.  
• Develop the right creative and content assets for the right channels. 
• Build an effective budget strategy and plan to refine as you gather data from your campaigns.  
• Plan for long-term and short-term phases by launching essential channels then build from there. 

Know Your Channels

• Outline goals, strategies, and tactics within each channel activation including SEM, social media, OTT/CTV, and more. 
• Understand the targeting parameters within each advertising platform and how they differ.  
• Know platform policies and limitations – they change all the time!  
• Know the ad creative options available within each platform. 
• Understand key KPI metrics for each campaign type you run. 
• Connect multi-channel reporting from all channels to a single source so you can look at the bigger picture.   

Establish Your Brand and Get Creative

• Establish brand guidelines if you don’t already have them including how you should be using your logo, image types, color palettes, fonts, and more. 
• Develop creative assets for organic and paid channels, understanding the differences in creative performance by channel. 
• Create a visual theme and be consistent to create a cohesive brand throughout your channels. 

Optimize Your Website

• Refine paths to conversion throughout your website and on the landing pages you’ll be using for paid campaigns. 
• Optimize for SEO and think about a long-term SEO and content strategy that aligns with your paid marketing.  
• Create a cohesive and simple design throughout your website.  
• Update and redesign mobile layouts and design your website with mobile-first in mind. 
• Add interactive elements into your website landing pages to promote engagement and increase conversion.  
• Evaluate your technical integrations to optimize lead flow, paid marketing campaigns, and reporting capabilities.  

Analyze Your Data

• Align goal tracking and make sure they are reporting in analytics. 
• Evaluate individual marketing efforts and channels as part of a bigger picture. 
• Drill down to key KPIs as these will differ by channel and campaign type.  
• Evaluate individual channel performance based on your conversion and goal types.  
• Test new campaigns, creative, and channels constantly! 
• Evaluate volume in context and don’t just look at volume of impressions, clicks, and conversions combined with cost efficiency.  
• Track conversion rates relative to leads and evaluate the quality of your leads and conversions. 

Plan Ahead

• Constantly adapt to ever-changing channel updates and make sure you’re keeping up to date with the latest tools and channels. 
• Keep up to date with the latest policies and the impacts those have. 
• Be flexible – don’t set and forget! 
• Stay relevant and keep on top of marketing trends, whether or not you implement them. 
• Build in efficiencies along the way based on performance. 
• Consistently expand upon what you have created by testing new channels and tactics to build in efficiencies in your marketing strategy. 

Incorporating these strategies into your marketing can help convert leads and improve customer retention. Need help vamping up your marketing strategy? Our team of experts are here to help. Reach out to us at connect@thebelfortgroup.com to get in touch today!