In my life, I’ve had two careers – football and digital marketing. Believe it or not, the strategy behind success in these two careers overlap so often, it sometimes feels like I’ve never left the field. Creating a powerful digital marketing program needs a strong offense, defense, special teams, and coaching staff. With these four elements, you’ll create a winning digital marketing strategy.
Offense: The Customer Acquisition Team
The offense of a football team is responsible for scoring you points. Likewise, the offense of your digital marketing program is responsible for finding new customers, bringing them to your site, and ensuring they generate revenue.
If you don’t have a good offense, it doesn’t matter how strong your defense is, you can’t win. The same goes for marketing: your customers will not find you. You have to go out and show your customers why they should do business with you.
To break this down, your marketing content should resemble a good offensive game plan. In football, they say that 80% of your plays should move the ball upfield. Your marketing content should be the same way. You should make 80% of your marketing content align with the values of your core product and the reasons why customers should do business with you.
That said, don’t be afraid to take a risk once in a while. You never know when an idea will electrify your offense and help you gain on your competition.
If you are having trouble with your marketing offense, don’t worry. ADM has a wealth of experience at driving sustainable growth across a multitude of industries.
Defense: The Customer Purchase Experience
Your team’s defense protects the points you’ve earned and helps you keep the lead on your opponents. In marketing, the defense is your website and customer funnel experience.
Your offense can score points all day, but if your defense is giving up the same amount or more, you can’t win your game. If your organic and paid media is incredible at driving prospective customers to your website, but your bounce rate is high, you won’t be able to build up your customer base. In order to contain the opposition, your marketing strategy should include a website and customer funnel that retains the customer throughout their shopping journey.
If you want game film, study your website’s analytics. Look for pages with high bounce rates and find areas to improve. Make sure that next game, you’re ready. Data is a defense’s best friend, but paralysis by analysis is real. If you are overwhelmed by the mountain of data or not sure where to start, reach out to ADM for help. All of our digital marketing programs are data-driven and tailored to your business goals.
Special Teams: The Niche Marketing Tools
On a football team, special teams are the small but important roles that keep you in the game. These teams are only on the field for about 20% of the game, but they account for about 35% of all points scored in a season. In your digital marketing game program, your special teams are services like SEO, influencer marketing, and customer service. They keep you in the game and attack your competition in ways your offense and defense cannot.
No business wants someone to contact them about an issue with their order, but a good customer service team can turn a negative into a positive, just like a long field goal. Turn defense into offense to get a head start on the competition.
Coaching Staff: The Digital Marketing Blueprint
Coaches see the whole field and know the strengths of each member of their team. In the same way, your marketing directors are your coaches. They keep an eye on paid media results, monitor website analytics, and track traffic from your influencers. From there, they can make strategy substitutions and call new plays to revitalize your digital marketing program.
You can’t forget about your fans either. They help energize your team and give them a morale boost when it is most needed. Your company has fans too and they can boost your marketing efforts with user-generated content (UGC), testimonials, and feedback about what you can tweak to make your product or service better. After all, without fans, who would we be playing for?
Recap
Just like in football, you need all phases of your digital marketing program to excel in order to be positioned for success. ADM is equipped for businesses that need assistance with one or more channels of their performance marketing strategy. This covers search, social, and programmatic channels, and has helped businesses strengthen their growth marketing efforts.
As a former collegiate football player, I founded ADM around teamwork, collaboration, and continuous improvement. We have experience in auditing, consulting, and implementing recommendations to help improve the performance of your digital marketing program. Contact us and we’ll show you how we can help your business turn your digital marketing program into a touchdown.
