“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it”

Every engagement that I undertake,  no matter the size, always begins with a Road Mapping Session.The road mapping sessions are designed to be the perfect minimal engagement for business owners, focusing on effectively diagnosing their digital challenges and prescribing inexpensive solutions.I've taken the some of the most valuable and impactful aspects of my previous client engagements, and turned them into a process that I provide to incoming clients with consistent results.

Road Mapping aligns perfectly with the 80/20 rule.This session is the 20% effort of your digital marketing campaign that will bring 80% of the results. The other 80%, creating and maintaining the campaign, can be considered design work.Design can always be finessed but process / perception is much harder to come by.Don't ask, does my website look good, ask does my website create value.

I designed so many benefits when creating the Road Mapping process.It is the best first step before any digital marketing campaign or even a much needed breather during the midst of an already existing campaign.Below I highlight 8 benefits of doing a Road Mapping Session.

The very first benefit is the opportunity to learn about your digital health.

This comes in the form of a technical audit. During which, I focus on the Google Search Console, your websites index status, perform site crawls, and finally, check mobile and international site speed performance.It doesn't make sense to embark on a Digital Marketing Campaign without having 100% Digital Health.It’s like going on a Road Trip without checking your tires and tuning up your car, your going to want to make sure your best prepared for the journey ahead.

The second benefit is clarifying your website goals, with a plan to achieve them.

Is your website an Asset or a Liability?All Website are created for a distinct purpose, therefore your website should be an asset to your business.Your physical presence should be supported, augmented and even amplified by your digital presence, so we focus on that.Your Website is working 24/7, It’s talking to your customers even while you’re sleep.So we need to make sure that it represents the business in the right way, and moves customers along the sales cycle appropriately. What if your goal is to grow your email list for your bi-weekly newsletter.We simply need to offer something of value to the customer in exchange for their email address.Now what we offer doesn’t have to be expensive and increase customer acquisition costs, it simply has to be of value to the customer.One strategy I've used to achieve this goal for Serett, was to can create a free ebook and give it away in exchange for the users email address.An ebook costs nothing to distribute, can easily be accessed on a myriad of devices and features content they already had on hand. The book contained a collection of their most popular finishes for stainless steel, with recommendations for the best application.This has tremendous value to architects (their target customer), providing them with guidance and expertise on an important aspect of their project.They gladly gave away their email addresses for the book, thus growing their list by the hundreds.In the future we plan to amplify the effort even further, by creating a facebook ad to increase our reach. By working backwards from the big goal to the little goal we are able to come up with a plan of action to achieve the little goal and maintain progress toward the bigger goals.Strategies like the one above are vital for success in today's competitive environment.It is a triple pronged attack.1) We achieved our original goal which was to growing our email list and giving us a healthy pool or Relevant targeted people that we can reach out to in the future.2) It helps to establish yourself as the authority figure and expert in your industry. If you wrote a book you must be an expert.3) Giving away value for free is the new black. By making it free you reduce all barriers to adoption and allowing your reach to go even further, reaching more people than if your book had a price.This tactic is inexpensive, but not simple to execute. As a one man digital agency these strategies come naturally to me.If I tried to compete with bigger agencies doing the same strategies & tactics, they would crush me immediately.So, In classic David vs Goliath fashion, our strategies have a high degree of finesse.We have to out think the competition.We have to leverage our existing strengths to achieve our goals.We have to combine your expertise + my expertise + the power of the internet to achieve amazing results.

The Third Benefit to Road Mapping is being interviewed by 10 people at once

In my past life, working at a marketing agency in NYC, I’ve become well versed in handling a majority of the responsibilities needed to execute a digital campaign.I prefer to be known as one man digital agency.When I take on a project, I see myself as the conductor and the players, simultaneously.On one hand I’m a director, responsible for communicating with the client, overseeing the creative process and creating and executing the project with a team.  On the other hand I’m also the production team, actually pushing the pixels that go into the final product.Being a renaissance man I found myself doing well jumping into different roles based on whatever project the agency has assigned me that week.In doing so I gained a unique perspective and began to see the reflexive equilibrium that the different roles create in marketing.It became easy for me identify problems in marketing campaigns and pinpoint why some are successful and others are not.During the interview I'm like a Director, I’m formulating a plan, that will be consistent and cohesive in objective and quality ranging across all aspects of your digital marketing campaign.

Fourth, It Includes a Competitive Analysis.

What better way to beat your competitors than to study them?The internet is transparent and you need to take advantage of that, by studying the competition we become aware of what strategies they are using to find success and we can incorporate them into the strategy that we will create.We don’t need to go to deep into the art of war but knowing your opponents strengths and weaknesses relative to your own is critical.We learn how their strengths can become our strengths and how we can exploit their weaknesses for opportunities.

The fifth benefit is Implementing Google Analytics & Analyzing Tailored Web Metrics.

Most Website CMS come with some form of analytics but the most robust is Google analytics.First we will install Google analytics to your own website* if you haven’t already.Then we will identify which web metrics you should be paying attention to.Not all metrics are valued the same, whilst all are important some are more important than others for your specific business. With analytics you should ask yourself, am I in a position to know if I actually attained this goal?If you aren’t tracking it how do you know if you’ve achieved it?One of the biggest advantages to digital marketing vs traditional marketing is the ability to correlate every dollar spent and it's ROI.You can’t measure the success of a billboard, we just know it’s up by the highway, but you can’t reliably track how many people came to your website from that billboard.What if you have 2 billboards and one is drastically out performing the other, how would you reliably know?That’s why Pay Per Click Ads and analytics work so well.You can easily identify a bad ad and immediately replace it with a better one, improving your marketing performance on a hourly basis. Speaking on analytics you must know, there is a distinct difference between just website analytics and digital marketing analytics.They both use Google Analytics as a medium tool but they ask very different questions.Digital marketing asks, Where did they come?Where Website analytics can include what kind of device they’re using?Website analytics can track how many people looked at a product.But Digital marketing would ask how many people look at this product as a result of our promotional email that we sent out last week, to a list that we specifically curated based on customers who have previously purchased a similar kind of product before.With digital marketing analytics you will know exactly that.

Sixth, Keyword Research.

Keyword research is typically included in the competitive analysis, but it deserves its own highlight as a benefit of a road mapping session.I will curate a list of suggested keywords that will primarily be used for SEO & PPC purposes.This list will adhere to a specific formula, containing words that will be highly searched for, with low competition, and with a high relevancy for your business.Search Engines work by sifting through enormous amounts of web pages indexed and analyzed by “spiders”.These spiders are bits of software that crawl through your entire website, looking for specific keywords to match with keyword phrases during searches.Basically this means its important to make sure your ranking for the correct terms in order to receive organic traffic from google.

The seventh benefit is that you get to experience a proven process found on diagnosing a problem before prescribing.

Creativity can be defined by the ability to see problems differently, thus finding solutions others cannot see.Being an outside expert, I have the advantage of perspective.In order for me to use my perspective and problem solving skills, I must engage in same manner I always do, taking my time to diagnose my client’s challenges.Which is why I created the Roadmapping Session.Before I begin any engagement I use the same diagnostic process to find the underlying story, the one the business owner can't see because they are to close to the elephant. An added benefit of using a process is, by having the same research questions in mind, this allows me to not only focus on the potential problems and opportunities but on your unique story as well.

The Last Benefit is the Takeaway Brief.

In this brief you will find a summary of the session. Along with the Competitive Analysis, Keyword Suggestions, Site Audit Checklist, and Web Analytics Metric Highlights.You will also getup a actionable write up from me consisting of my findings and my recommendations moving forward.The best thing about this takeaway brief is that is a standalone document completely separate from me.If you choose not to continue the engagement with me, you can always take the solutions and implement them independently.At your own leisure you can hire an agency overseas (I don’t blame you I’m expensive.), or take care of it in-house.The brief is designed like a road map simply providing suggested guidance.  If this sounds like something you can to experience book a Road Mapping Session with me today.