This is a real Method Map used with a Hughes & Co. client
Marketing should be calculated and strategic, it should never sit undocumented or analyzed. That is why at Hughes & Co. we believe in something we call the Method Map. The concept has evolved as we've grown, but it has fundamentally remained a map of what happens when you work with our team. We lay it all out on the table, we are transparent and real. We document the wins and losses, the good, the bad and the ugly. So here is what we look at and why we bother, hopefully it helps you figure out where you can do better and perform to a more profitable level in your own business.
The H&C Method Map is the foundation of the entire marketing campaign. We consider this the roadmap to success. The purpose of this document is to turn your business goals into marketing goals, and to establish a better understanding of your prospects.
It also outlines the complete 12 month marketing strategy that we have created to attract, convert and nurture your prospects.
We take a look at everything that is happening with the client today. We assess their business and what makes it a valuable business in the marketplace. This takes us through every element of their offering from products to service to internal communications, we want to know it all. We spend time with our clients, get to know what they do and push hard in our meetings to get to know what makes them smile and makes their faces turn a shade of red. It sounds aggressive and it is. We can do our best for them when we know what is going to make them shine, we want to avoid the negative and slowly work with them to get them to a place where that is all fair game. They always get there and we are excellent and demonstrating the value of why we even bother to try.
We also take a look at current marketing strategies, budgets for the last few years, and their overall branding strategy. Most of our clients spend four to six months evolving their brand as we work with them to get their marketing in order. We always onboard our clients, but the organic development of a strong brand takes longer than that. You can't just slap a logo on it and call it a day, you have to work with the client to get them to own and believe in their brand. It is worth the effort at the end of the day, and the results are more rewarding.
As we noted above, we dig into the nitty gritty of the business side of things. We take a look at revenue, projections, growth percentages and revenue goals. We need to know what the product or service costs, what the profit margins are, how many they are selling and how easy it is to make those sales. Then we have to know what they wish they were doing. We go through goal setting exercises that help us understand if their goals are SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timely). These goals will ultimately fill the formulas that we use to help us do our job. We don't do marketing for the sake of marketing, we do marketing to help build a business, build the profit margin and reach the target. We offer services for business, and business requires sales and profit to stay alive and more importantly, thrive.
Beyond the analysis of the current brand, we track what the competition is up to. We can predict that in an industry that has few competitors (often the case in a local market), once we have cleaned up a web presence the competitors will follow suit. It is important for our clients to know who is doing what and why, that is our job. We track ads in publications, we watch social media professional and personal and we maintain a grading system for sites to compare the performance level. As you might guess, our clients are always out-performing the competition from a rank and conversion perspective, and it is our relationship with HubSpot that empowers us to know that.
This element of the process requires intimate knowledge of what our client is looking for. We develop buyer personas, we work with them to know who their ideal client is and then we go out and find them. To facilitate a slick marketing process that works we need to know who we are going after. If you want to market to your ideal client, it is time to start thinking like them. What do they do when they wake up in the morning, are they reading emails as soon as they enter the office or are they checking in on staff? What kind of person are they? Dig into your knowledge of them and start to tailor your behaviour to theirs.
We work specifically on Inbound Marketing strategies, and most of that is founded in smart content creation for digital marketing strategies. That means that we do a lot of work on keywords. We spend the early days analyzing our best opportunity keywords (mostly long-tail in nature) and we document all of it. As we progress we track our top 25 per quarter and focus on creating long-tail options for those keywords. That being said, we create content for the user first, and we try to keep a decent keyword density just by staying focused on the goal of the content. If we are writing about something specific, we stay focused on that topic.
This is where we put the secret sauce. What are we going to do to help propel the success of our clients. How are we going to make them successful, meet their goals and make them the kind of money we know they are capable of making. That is the real excitement, and we can't wait to make this magic happen. Inbound marketing and any content marketing in general typically takes between three to six months to get started. If we are starting from nothing, it is much closer to the six month timeline to get a really solid lead pipeline filling up. Typically the trickle starts around three months. If we are taking over an existing site that has some content marketing in place already, we are looking at closer to three or four months to make the magic happen. Sometimes this scares our prospects, and it might be scaring you as you decide to embark on this journey, but the truth is that this is the future of marketing. If you don't start today, your three to four months starts even later.
Quarterly we assess our progress and make honest notes about where we are and how we are doing. We acknowledge our success and shortcomings, we make plans for the next quarter and focus forward. It is a necessary element of marketing to take a look at what you've been doing and see where you can improve. Our modus operandi is to try everything and focus on what works. That is why we have the clients we always dreamed of, and when you adopt the same methodology it will be why your company is flourishing with digital lead generation success!
So that is the recipe for our Method Map, and while it is labourious to compile and consider each element of this document, it is an essential component of marketing success. To learn about the metrics that you should be considering in your goal setting and KPI you should download the e-book at the link below, it will be most helpful!