Table of Contents

Marketing Roadmap

Entrepreneurs tend to operate on emotion, optimism and enthusiasm. All good traits, but with marketing you need to take a measured, detailed approach to developing a complete strategy. Your ultimate goal should be to create a universal brand that is recognized as the authority and industry leader.

Part I: The Foundation

Problem Identification

Have you defined the problem you are trying to solve? You should always define the problem before the solution. If you are making keys before you have found a lock, you’re going to struggle. Be specific.

Targeting

Who suffers from the defined problem? This is your minimum viable audience. They should be just big enough for you to make money. If the audience is too big, you will have a difficult time creating a compelling emotional connection with your audience. This initial audience will be your advocates, that help you grow to a larger audience.

It will be beneficial to create at least one persona. This will be a generalized example of your ideal target. I.e. “35 – 45 year old women with families, who live an active lifestyle and appreciate quality products.” Taking this step helps to create messaging and sub-campaigns.

Competitive Research

If you want to be the leader, you are not looking to copy your competitors, but you certainly need to go to school on their position. What are they selling? How are they selling it? How is it priced? What is their voice and message? If you don’t have direct competitors, make sure you find similar companies that are speaking to the customers or someone you would want to emulate.

Messaging

Before designing or even naming the company, you should define your messaging. Does this sound backward? It’s not. What you say should have a larger influence on how it looks. First, you are going to start with your brand statement. If you want to dive deeper into this, read Donald Miller’s Story Brand.

1. Who is the target audience?
2. What do they want?
3. What are the external and internal problems preventing them from getting what they want?
4. Why are you qualified to help? Empathy and expertise.
5. What is the simple 3 – 5 step process?
6. What is the direct call to action? Ready to action now.
7. What is the transitional call to action? Need more information.
8. If they work with you, what does success look like?
9. If they don’t, what will failure look like?

With these answers, you can create a brand statement that helps define a purpose that resonates with your target audience.

Brand Script Example:

We know that being a leader, growth, and ROI are important to you. But to make that happen, you need a roadmap and a guide.

The problem is all the noise. Too many tactics, too many bad actors, and not enough real experience. This leaves you feeling lost, overwhelmed, and stuck.  

We believe that marketing should be FUN and establish you as the industry authority!

So, we have taken 25 years of experience working with over 1,000 businesses to develop a tailored, systematic progression that eliminates the BS, creates omnipresence, and makes your business universal. That means doing the work you love and making more money in the process.

Here is how it’s done:

Schedule your assessment today or take our online assessment, so you can stop worrying and stressing over what should be a rad journey on your way to taking a W. 

Brand

After you have your messaging locked in, you can develop your brand guide. This will be a single source of truth that is the keeper of your colors, fonts, logo variations, and templates. While this might sound like a little bit of a pain, it will help make everything much more fluid in the future. 

Crucial Step: Profile & Security Audit

Now that you have your brand guide, you can start to go through all your profiles, listings, and social media and get everything updated with your new brand standards. Claim everything…even if you don’t plan on using it. 

While you are doing this, you should also be centralizing and updating all your logins and passwords into a vault like Dashlane. This is a crucial failure point for every business we have worked with.

Part II: The Website

Customize The Site vs. Build a Custom Site vs. Build a Template Site

There are a lot of variables that help you to determine which is the best path. My recommendation is going to be to compare the effectiveness vs. the cost. Do what is necessary for you to do business in the next 6 to 12 months. Remember, your website is an organic part of your business and should always be improved. If you decide to keep your current site and customize it, follow these steps.

Website UX/UI Audit

This is the first of many audits your website will go through. The purpose here is to find and fix any UX/UI (user experience/user interface) or functionality breakpoints; desktop, mobile, page speed, broken pages, links, forms, calls, etc. 

Technical SEO Audit

This is the first of two SEO reviews, you should be looking for any technical issues that would affect Google’s ability to index your website properly or create any obfuscation. You may need the help of an expert. If you want to try it yourself, I recommend AHREFs Software.

Update Website

With your messaging and branding in hand, it’s time to customize (or rebuild) your website to convey to your customers that you are the solution to their problems.

Crucial Step: Analytics & Tracking

This is usually overlooked until much later in the journey (even most marketing agencies miss this), but it might be the most important. We have to define where you are now, where you want to go, and a way to track progress. 

1. Define what you want…The Goals and KPIs
2. Identify leading indicators 
3. Create Baselines & Notes
4. Centralize data with a dashboard (Recommendation: Agency Analytics)
5. Customize GA4 analytics to track conversions & engagement (you may need help with this)

Part III: Marketing

Paid Search & Social

NOW it’s time to run some ads. Why start with search and social ads? They are highly targeted, relatively inexpensive, and provide immediate results. The purpose of this stage is to start with small budgets to research, learn, and test outcomes. You shouldn’t be expecting mass conversions here. We just need to start getting feedback on the keywords, targeting, messaging, the website, and conversion funnels. 

Later we will revisit budgets and targeting.

Onsite SEO

This is the second SEO evolution. At this point, you should be developing a long-term plan for the pages and content you plan to have on your website. 

1. It starts with keyword research. You need an intimate understanding of the search terms your intended target is using and the intent of those searches. (Some of this will come from your ads) 
2. Next, you have a page and internal link audit. Where do you stand now vs. what you need, and how are those pages going to connect?
3. Finally, you need to develop what we call a Content Matrix. This is a map of the pages you have, the pages you need, and how they will interconnect with each other.

Content Marketing

Now that you know your target keywords and the pages/posts that will be required, you can develop a content calendar and execute the plan. Post frequency depends on a lot of factors, but you want to post a minimum of once per week. If you are in a very competitive market or you have fallen behind your competitors, you may need 30 – 50 posts per month. It just depends on how aggressive you want to be. 

Email Marketing

As you develop content, you need to have a plan to get it in front of the target audience. It is always better to start with an email list than a social audience. If you don’t have an email list, that is the first step…Start collecting emails. If you have a list, clean it. Using your brand guide develop an email template, and create a calendar based on the pages and posts you will develop. You should plan to email your list at least once per month. 

Social Marketing

Same concept with email marketing. You have content to promote, which gives your social media some purpose. Design a bank of templates for each platform and create a calendar based on your content. Your plan here should be to post 2-3 times per week. If you go over or under, don’t worry about it. Just make sure you are active. 

Keep in mind that for both email and social, we are developing a consistent foundation for communication and awareness. As immediate, relevant, or noteworthy information becomes available, it should be promoted.

Part IV: Outreach

Research & Interviews

Let’s get out there and talk to people. Don’t wait for your target audience to come to you. You need to go to where they are. You have a compelling solution to their problem, and you should be introducing your business to them. Here is the process:

1. Prospect Identification & Enrichment – The two best places to find people are through LinkedIn or website searches
2. Take all the information you are collecting and put it in a CRM (Recommendation: Salesforce)
3. Reach out to your prospects and ask to interview them. You will take these interviews and turn them into content and research. 
4. Every interview should be recorded so you have video, audio, and a transcript. (Recommendation: Riverside)
5. Having these interviews gives you unique and linkable content for blog posts, whitepapers, YouTube, and a podcast. 

The results of this effort are huge:

1. You have developed a database for future communication.
2. You have created relationships with potential customers. 
3. You have created the opportunity to network and provide them with a transitional CTA.

PR

The most important thing is to have something newsworthy or, at the very least, unique. The content and research you developed from your outreach should prove to be very useful in creating something unique, if not newsworthy. 

Video

Now that you have the confidence and process for creating video content, you can start to add more content to your channel. 

1. Provide reviews of books, podcasts, software, research, etc. 
2. Give a point of view on recent events in your industry
3. Create “how to” guides
4. Give new life to older blog posts
5. Add short clips to static pages
6. Give context to research

Social Engagement

The last step we would engage in is engagement with communities and social platforms. Why the last one? It takes a lot of time, expertise, and emotional intelligence to do this right. It can be as easy as answering a few questions, but usually, it’s a bit more involved than that. There is a lot of upside here, but again, this is more effective after everything else is done. 

Budgets

There is a TON of conflicting information about budgets, percentages, and spending. It’s all probably right and wrong at the same time. Here is our stance…Be aggressive. It’s better than being obscure. If you want to be average, spend an average amount. If you take the path we outlined above, you’re making sure that your marketing spend is based on a solid foundation and that you are tracking results. 

Here are some suggestions:

• Startup 15% – 20%
• Established Companies Under $5M: 7% – 15%
• Maintenance Marketing: 5% – 8%

Suggested Reading

Here is a starter list of books that I would suggest every business-minded person read. Some are really business-focused, and some are a little more mental strategy. Hope you can find them useful!

1. Simon Sinek: Find Your Why
2. Mike Michalowicz: Clockwork
3. Tony Fadell: Build
4. Mike Michalowicz: Profit First
5. Seth Godin: This is Marketing
6. Donald Miller: Story Brand
7. Brain Moran: 12 Week Year
8. James Clear: Atomic Habits
9. David Goggins: Can’t Hurt Me
10. Grant Cardone: The 10X Rule
11. Mike Michalowicz: Fix This Next
12. Brent Gleeson: Embrace the Suck
13. Charles Duhig: Smarter Faster Better
14. Adam Grant: Originals
15. Trevor Moawad: It Takes What It Takes

Techstack

These are a lot of the tools we use every day. Some are pretty basic, while others are a lot more advanced.

• Ahrefs: SEO & Website Tools
• GA4: Free Analytics
• CallRail: Call & Form Tracking
• Page Optimizer Pro: Advanced SEO Tool
• Dashlane: Password Vault
• ChatGPT: AI
• Riverside: Virtual Studio
• Salesforce: CRM
• Lemlist: Cold Email Outreach
• Hunter: Data Enrichment
• PhantomBuster: Data Enrichment
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Prospect Research
• Premier Pro: Video Editing
• Photoshop: Advanced Image Editing
• Canva: Basic Image Editing
• Figma: Design & Wireframing
• Envato Elements: Image/Graphic Library
• Kadence: Super Fast WordPress Theme
• WooCommerce: Basic WordPress E-commerce
• Shopify: Advanced E-commerce