Episode 87 - Corey Morris

Erik Martinez: Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik Martinez and today we have Corey Morris, the owner and CEO of Voltage on the show to talk about his book, The Digital Marketing Success Plan, and how you can apply it to your process to achieve your goals. Corey, welcome to the show.

Corey Morris: Yeah, thanks for having me, Erik.

Erik Martinez: Hey man, I have been looking forward to this- and then you rescheduled on me like 17 times. But hey, you know what? I'm glad you're here and thank you for providing a copy of the book. I very much enjoyed going through it.

Before we start diving into that fun topic, Corey, can you just give the audience a brief [00:01:00] introduction to yourself?

Corey Morris: So, I've been in a lot of nerdy areas of digital marketing over my career. I'm coming up on actually this month on my 20th year of my career. It's also the 20th year of Voltage, the agency I own. And so it's a kind of a monumental year in a lot of ways, and a lot of what we do now is disrupted and changing with AI.

But it reminds me as I sat back a little bit, looked at my bio and laughed at some of the things we were doing 20 years ago in SEO specifically, and where we thought we were like breaking the rules and seeing disruption. It's also laughable where we are now with all the changes that are happening.

But yeah, my career started in a digital agency and I ended up in a couple of other roles, ended up in Voltage in 2013 and ended up going through, non-traditional entrepreneurial journey where I went through acquiring the agency after working my way up to running it.

[00:02:00] And now my focal point is heavily on really the topics in the book of making sure that whether you're a client of mine on the agency side, or where you just pick up the book or I can hand you the book for free without any dollars going in my pocket just to stop brands from losing money that Google will take, whether it's working or not or your agency or, you know, the in-house investments when we have the chance to pause and plan and know that it can work.

Erik Martinez: That's awesome. You know, I was reading through the book and I've got a mix of clients over the years who have done a great job of planning. And then the vast majority are running so fast that they rush right up to their budget season and they're like, " Oh my God, it's budget season and I've gotta have the numbers to my finance team by the end of the month." So they replicate their budget from the prior year.

That's what I found so fascinating about your process. So tell us what is the digital marketing success plan and [00:03:00] why is it essential for businesses looking to improve their digital marketing performance.

Corey Morris: In most cases, businesses are already doing some mix of channels and platforms for digital marketing, whether that's anything under the umbrella from SEO to paid search, to social email, programmatic, whatever it might be, whatever mix is there. And is fueled by content as well.

So, companies and people in those companies have inherited the fact that the content calendar and the cadence of, well, we post four blog posts a month and we promote them on social media seven times a week, and we have an email newsletter that goes out and everything that we do, we try to optimize.

And we have our Google Ads campaign over here that may or may not be linked up and integrated well with the other channels and data and metrics, and a lot of those things are good things. And they're good tactics, but there are a number of reasons why it's so important beyond the fact that all this is changing so rapidly and we're chasing the shiny objects of [00:04:00] what's happening daily.

We'll sit down and we'll start challenging. Is it working or not? So in some cases it's, I don't have attribution, maybe had it at one time, or CRM isn't set up. That's where we see an absence of a strategy and goals and attribution where we can know that this is a marketing investment with an expectation of return on investment versus a marketing expense and a set of activities and tactics.

So there's a whole lot to unpack there. You could go down a number of paths of what situations companies are in, but I know there's probably five to six different commonalities of where they are in that journey. And it can be anywhere from, we're just doing all the activities - we've got a really solid plan but there's still gaps in it, or we haven't redone it for the next year. To your point, it gets replicated.

Okay. We need to say time out while we're running the existing one. Is there anything we're missing? Are we too close to it? Do we need to take a step back and reformat it for the next year?

Erik Martinez: Yeah it's really interesting. I sat on a call [00:05:00] with one of my clients- just listen in. Periodically,

I'll jump in, listen to this call and we were having a discussion about testing. And they spend a fair amount of money in meta more so than their paid search.

And when I got off the call and I pulled my team together and I'm like, "Okay. Guys, we have to draw out a picture for them of why their process, which, based on everything they've told us is really more about how they can report their campaign results than the efficacy of the program."

And it's like, hold it. I've got the cart before the horse here. Right. We're supposed to have the efficacy of the program first- we can figure out the reporting. So I think you're absolutely right and I think a lot of it comes from, they're just very busy.

They've got lots of hats - they're worrying about internal pressures that are making their lives a little more complicated. So it's really cool to talk about your framework. In your book, you talk about the start framework. What is it and how does it influence the [00:06:00] digital marketing success plan?

Corey Morris: Yeah, I call it the start planning process. It's a five step process, naturally it's an acronym. And it starts with strategy. In the sense, and in that phase, we are auditing existing assets, existing performance. We don't want to assume that everything's great. We don't wanna assume everything's bad, right? So we wanna understand what our current strengths and weaknesses are.

We want to get the team aligned. I've had clients where five people in the room of the stakeholders in this conversation been in the company 20 plus years, all using the same terminology. Yet they mean different things because they're coming at it from a different angle where one might be representing a perspective from sales, one might be wearing all those marketing hats. One might be from the CEO or owner. Another might be coming at it from a product development or on the ground, or customer service side of it.

And so while they're using the same language they're not defining success, quote unquote, the same way. And they have different goals and wins based on the lens that they're [00:07:00] looking through.

So getting alignment there and be able to articulate and map out not just marketing KPIs but business outcomes is critical. And we'll get into review and reporting later in the process. But if you don't know what you need at a business level and what marketing needs to drive X number of leads or sales or whatever.

If you can't define that and have the ability to quantify it and work backwards from there into the marketing and KPIs, you're gonna always have this gap of knowing whether it's working or not and what that investment is. So getting the strategy nailed down is the first phase. Then everything flows from there.

The second phase, or second step is tactics. Now we know what we need to get. Now we can go into the research tools the platform specific keyword planner, ad planning tools, third party tools. If you've got any industry research that you've conducted or that you can get from a trade [00:08:00] association or off the shelf from a data partner. Great!

To now go. This is the cheap phase where it costs very little to go find out the information and take our best guess. Instead of putting dollars straight into those platforms and finding out six weeks later after you've burned a lot of money to test and learn, quote unquote.

Well, you learned a lot hopefully in that phase, but in this step, I want to take as much as we can get from the outside and influence what we apply in terms of our tactics from channels to platforms in the mix of how they work together with your marketing funnel or your customer journey.

Plus, if you get to this point, you don't have your funnel or journey mapped out really well. You're gonna be forced to make some decisions here before you go turn on an ad or start something, and you're attempting to go spend money. That's the first two phases. Then again, it flows from there.

Then the A is application, and this is where we understand, we know what the strategy is. We know what [00:09:00] tactics we're gonna be deploying against it. Now let's plan out what we need in terms of content to fuel it, what kinds of display ad assets we might need, or creative.

What do we need to do with our website? Is it ready for us to be spending money? Because the worst thing to do is have your strategy tactics lined out and then you realize, "Oh crap- now it's gonna take us six months to go get the party ready to host."

And so getting this lined out upfront helps you understand the resources you need to commit, how to flight things out, and take an iterative approach if that's the right plan for you as well.

Then the R is review. I call it review. I don't call it reporting, but this is where we're getting our reporting house in order. This isn't just taking GA four out of the box or a third party dashboard to all the different sources. Those don't necessarily get you to your use cases, to those business outcomes.

They don't factor in how much the software itself costs. How much you're paying your in-house team, or how much you're paying an agency or a partner. So they're not able to give you a full picture [00:10:00] of ROI and or this is where you can start tackling with other stakeholders how to get things connected with your CRM or ERP or whatever missing link you have in that.

So getting a reporting house in order, and then the t, the second T in the process is called transformation. This is where the whole thing comes together. We get it documented in whatever format makes sense. If you have project management software, get it resource planned out and build in the right level of agile checkpoints with planned activities for the next six months or the year.

And so we typically get through this process, if my agency is helping implement it in roughly 90 days. But if you've got a great process and you're supplementing parts or pieces maybe that my framework has that maybe yours is missing, then just integrate it into your existing process.

Or if you want to self implement this thing again, it's all out there in the book and I've got some great resources. If you're stuck, for example, on the funnel mapping part of it, which will help you go through it on your own too. And so you could go through this in a few days. [00:11:00] You could go through this. I wouldn't recommend stretching out more than 90 because then you're just planning for planning it's sake. And it gets old.

Or you have a hard time resisting turning things on and having patience with the planning process. But 30 to 90 days is solid for this to get those five steps.

Erik Martinez: Do you ever get any pushback on the 90 days? That's one question.

And then the second question is. If somebody invests the 90 days or maybe it's a little bit less, if they're investing that time, how often should they revisit?

Corey Morris: So great question. So the 90 day part, I haven't had any challenges with that timing. I've had a couple that had and I'm speaking with my agency hat on where we implement this process and walk clients through it versus the self-serve version where you can pick up the book and run it yourself.

But when we've partnered with clients to implement and lead them through it. You know, I've had some maybe deadlines of when they've gotta have some campaigns running [00:12:00] that put some pressure on it. We move it up to 60 days or 45 days or break it up a little bit. But in. Most cases when we look at the touch points of how we're stepping through it together and giving enough room to breathe and to review some aspects of it so we don't get a full plan developed before they see it, there's partnership throughout.

It makes more sense when you can see how that phased approach or that we're working through the steps works. And in other cases, we've been asked to keep the lights on with their existing paid search or whatever to take some pressure off so we're not just turning off ads that are running .

But when it comes to revisiting the plan, the other part of your question I recommended an annual process, it doesn't have to be full start to finish. It can be a revisit or refresh to it. Especially if you have enough milestones built in where whether it's monthly or quarterly, you are recalibrating and not just blindly running the plan.

The whole thing to me is about finding balance. Yes, it's [00:13:00] planning, it sounds boring, you want to set a plan and work against it, but with how things change and are changing in our industry and in these channels. You have to not just be head down, blindly running the plan for a year and hope it all works out perfectly.

But you also can't just be chasing all the shiny objects and abandoning your plan a week in without having it documented and it be your accountability. Having enough agility built into it to give you room, to test, to pivot, to optimize and change direction while you're going. So if you're doing enough of that, you may not need as big of an annual refresh, but at a minimum you should take a step back at whatever interval that financial planning's happening for the company.

Our goals are being set annually or whatever that is. So you never get out of balance with having that business outcome be connected directly to what marketing is driving toward.

Erik Martinez: Do you ever find that? One year [00:14:00] timeframe is too short a timeframe for the objectives that clients are putting in front of you. I've always been a big proponent of the 90 day short tactical plan. And maybe a little bit of a strategy retouch at that point.

What I'm hearing you say, it kind of feels to me this way so maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I feel like, Hey, you know, you guys really should have a one year plan, but you might want to make that a little bit longer so you can have continuity and then periodic check-ins to make sure you're staying on track. Is that a fair interpretation? Or am I missing the boat here?

Corey Morris: Yeah, no. My team sometimes surprises marketing colleagues on the client side by asking some very business directional questions. They might come in thinking they're gonna talk about paid search, and we're like, we'll nerd out with you on Google Ads, but we're not ready to talk about that in this meeting even.

We need to talk about where your business is going and understand how the business makes money and what the goals are around that. So if [00:15:00] there's a 10 year plan, a 5 year plan, if we know the owner or founder wants to exit, or there's a PE firm. We want to know as much as we're allowed to know and what's public or at least private in the company because that will gauge where we set milestones and goals.

And that will help the marketing team whether they were privy to that before or asking those questions or not in their day to day. Align their strategy around that. And so in some cases we don't have that and it's fine. And more siloed organizations are those who keep it closer to the vest, even within internally for totally legit reasons.

But when it comes to how we set that. The further out we can see and work backwards from the better because then we're not shortsightedly trying to drive, you know, a hundred leads this month, then we don't know what the goal is next month or we're trying to hit this goal for the year. Then we're surprised with an arbitrary one the next year that we don't have any rhyme or reason or understanding about. And then there's too much calibration that has to happen there.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, that totally makes [00:16:00] sense. You know, I find that many marketers and their agencies can get very channel and tactics focused and quarterly focused or monthly focused versus that strategic component.

And like you said, planning isn't necessarily fun, but it can be actually. I think talking about goals and where we're headed is always a lot of fun. But I think because of the pressure due to deadlines or changes in the business climate, they get kind of stuck. Right. We all get a little bit stuck. I know, I do.

What other typical challenges do you find that marketing leaders face when planning and how does the start process specifically help them avoid common pitfalls and strategy development?

Corey Morris: Yeah, I've got seven or eight stories in the book where to break it up and not just be this- process. I've given some real stories where I've changed names of clients and people, so I could be fully detailed in those.

And some of those range from again, being tactics first and not [00:17:00] strategy first that we talked about others have to do with if it's all in somebody's head. A person's wearing a whole bunch of hats or the person on the team, or three or four people on a team, and they all have their own subject matter expertise or assignments. One person leaves and your plan just walked out the door and it's hard to restart. Go find new softwares, vendors, their preferences on what they think you should be doing. And because it wasn't documented.

Other situations where we're constantly, especially in high growth organizations, where everything is breaking because we're growing so fast and we're building the processes and systems as we grow. In some of those cases you could have a plan that two weeks in now, it's what I call CEO drive-bys, quote unquote.

Where, whether it's a CEO or a product development person or someone somewhere comes by and says, "Hey, have you thought about this audience? Or, we're thinking about going to this trade show," or " We're gonna launch [00:18:00] this new feature or this new product. Can you work that in?" Or " Can we promote that or have a post or articles or white papers or whatever?:

And if that wasn't in the initial plan, sometimes if you don't say timeout, even if for five minutes, how does this integrate in? How does this change priorities of other stuff? Is there a new or dedicated budget for this? How does this change things? What can sometimes happen is you run with that, you abandon some of the other stuff that you were in the plan and then that happens again and again.

And that could be the CEO drive- by and the internal things. That could be the external things like Google's algorithm just changed overnight and the traffic we were planning on getting is no longer there. Or AI did this thing. Or a competitor just launched something. And those are what I call trigger events. Where we need to rethink the effectiveness of our plan and what's in it in real time, and not wait until we get to our next regularly scheduled interval.

But all of those things. If you get to the end of the year and you're reviewing it and you're like, "Well, what's our ROI on the plan?" And you're [00:19:00] explaining that to whoever you're accountable to and, " Well, we didn't really follow the plan. ' Cause two months in, you asked me about this thing and we changed our focus to that and this thing happened and we zigged and zagged all over the place."

That could sound like excuses and you can't be objective to go track that ROI back to what happened because you changed essentially your plan every time one of those happens.

So, just being able to have some type of digital or physical document that you can say, timeout, this isn't personal. It's not because I don't like Meta versus Google or I was too busy or I didn't ask you if that was a directive or an idea on that tactic or that concept to be able to work through that and stick to the plan and say, "Okay, how does that change this and where we're going."

It's got enough flexibility that we can change it, but at the same time, what's gonna give so we can stay objective to that truth. The plan is the plan until it's not the plan.

Erik Martinez: I used to work for this company, family owned business, [00:20:00] and the owner would walk in to one of my team members and go, : Hey, would you do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And my office was kitty corner, so I overheard the whole conversation and I'd walk over to my team member and say, " Okay, I know he is the owner and he just asked you to do something. However, he's forgetting the priorities that we already agreed to and doesn't understand the impact of this."

So let me go talk to him first. Make sure that's really something he wants to trade. And then go move forward.

Corey Morris: Empower him to have a decision point rather than have regret that you didn't bring it up. You know, six months later.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. And it's fine if he or she wanna make that pivot. We just need to put it in the context of, "Hey, just understand that these five priorities are now gonna get pushed down the list and we may not achieve them in this timeframe. "

Corey Morris: And in some cases, this goes back to another one of the challenges that I didn't get into earlier is how familiar everybody [00:21:00] is on that team or in a stakeholder group or reporting structure with the subject matter. It's easy to be a CEO for a long time and, you know, go through digital transformation and you heard a competitor or a colleague tell you that, "Hey, they did this one tactic and it worked really well." Or you went to, or you saw it online, this magic thing that's gonna solve all of your lead generation needs or whatever.

And in any of those situations, understanding the subject matter really well or well enough, or having the ability to get things defined can help prevent some of that disconnect of thinking. That, maybe as the CEO, this is a five minute thing, it's not gonna take time or budget away from something else. Versus this is six months of investing heavily in content to maybe get rankings organically for that new thing.

And AI has changed it. What that even means for us those are the decision points and things that if you're not setting proper expectations in your organization are gonna get [00:22:00] out of alignment quickly or cause constant strain.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. I'm a big fan of Jim Collins' Good To Great. And it's funny because the world reacts to a company's sudden success. Like they flipped a switch. And when you really end up doing the research, and this is what Jim Collins talks about in his book, is there was a lot of years of effort working towards a goal. And sometimes that goal, you know, we're talking a year or two here in marketing which these days changes very quickly so we have to be a little more nimble. But the overall mission of the organization is talked about in terms of decades.

And so when they suddenly burst on the scene, it's not sudden. It took many years and there are cases where somebody gets lucky and hits. But look at Amazon. Amazon's a great example of this. It disrupted the book market and here we are almost 30 years [00:23:00] later, and they're one of the top two or three retailers in the world. Who would've thought? So I think you're absolutely right.

Going back to start, you know, one of the things that struck me about the framework is that part of your planning process you're not stopping at strategy and tactics. I think that's also one of the key challenges that we all do. Like, "Hey, we did strategy. We know what tactics. Let's go."

But one of the things that struck me is that working through creative, your measurables and your implementation calendar upfront, so you have a really well crafted, cohesive set of things for people to work on. Again, that's a lot of work and time and you addressed this briefly before. But can we dive a little more into how we integrate this planning process with the ongoing work? Cause I think is you're doing this for the first time, probably the most stressful part.

Corey Morris: Yeah. So A is application and in many cases you can think about the assets as well of what you need to be able to pull this off. And in [00:24:00] some cases, this is resources that you need.

If you are not creating content at scale today. Part of the tactics connected to your strategy are that we're gonna create all this content. Well now this is a fundamental change in your organization, whether it's in your marketing team or you gotta go hire a writer or whatever it is.

I'm picking on that one. But if we've gotta fundamentally change the website, then we gotta go get web development resources. Or we find some holes or gaps in our brand, we need our brand strategist or branding agency or firm or creatives involved. You don't want that to be a surprise. You get your plan ready and then it's like, "Oh, well we can't activate any of this. So why did we go through this exercise?"

I had an example early in my career, I worked with a national restaurant chain in the first agency I worked in. And had this amazing strategy I outlined for just SEO not even digital marketing in an integrated way, but just SEO and had this great plan.

We were [00:25:00] able to test it out on a couple of locations and we're ranking like for all over Pittsburgh number one, two. And we were ready to roll it out to all locations and this restaurant chain said, " Okay, but we can't touch any SEO or any other priorities." The dev team, IT team couldn't for six months. Because they were in the middle of some systems, PLS restaurant specific project, so I was surprised with being told it's gonna take six months.

In other scenarios where we've got a nice plan ready to go then finding out that the copywriter or the UX designer going out for well deserved parental leave. But then how do you pivot?

If you've gone through this process and you have momentum and then have to put it on the shelf or have it drop off because you don't have the resources ready. And so whether it's a resources or assets, be able to produce the assets and not bite off too much, but also make sure that you're prepared and you can be ready to go.

In some cases we [00:26:00] find deficiencies with the website, but do we want to take six months to build the new website or do we wanna just create some landing pages and some workarounds. We can do things in parallel. You are not just locked into a linear path here. We can work around this and get some momentum and help see some ROI helps pay for the capital investment in the website that maybe we do next year versus this year.

And so that's a really solid decision making point because you don't necessarily need to build out ads for the next year because you wanna possibly change those, optimize those, but to know that you have enough assets. Whether they're, again, ads, flights of content. So we do things often in sprints and flights to make sure we got the first one ready to go. Or we've documented an inventory of what we're gonna need. So there's no surprises when we get the plan ready to activate.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I think that's super smart. You talk throughout the book about being nimble and having some flexibility to adjust the environments and you just gave some great examples of [00:27:00] things that happen all the time.

I mean it in most companies is the worst. I was working with a client a couple years ago on a fractional basis, and I said, " Here's what I need. Here's a list of data I need on a regular basis in this form and I need the ability to go query it." Pretty simple. IT director's like, "Yeah, no problem." Never got it.

And when the general manager asked me, "Well, why didn't you press on it?" I'm like, " We have workarounds." We can keep doing our work. We understand what's on their plate and the priorities that they're working against.

So we've gotta have that flexibility. We can't just stop work because something or someone is in the way. But if you have a good plan, you also know, "Hey, that probably is one of the risk factors and here's our alternative plan." So I think that's really smart.

Corey Morris: Some of those things impact ROI too, right? And so you wanna catch this in the planning phase and not have a plan written where we have question marks about what it's gonna cost [00:28:00] to go get those other things.

I actually have written about this for Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal in the past too, about how SEO is not just an investment in people with the title SEO or software that's for SEO. It touches so many other things. And so ROI for SEO can be mapped out and put against IT or web development resources.

you may have content and so sometimes you don't think about allocate budget for something and then you're, "Why do we need all these other components or people?" It's shortsighted if you don't realize that early enough and that will impact your ROI math, because if you just had to double, essentially your budget for the effort to get the same things that you thought you were gonna get you may be upside down.

Instead of looking at 20% profit, you may be looking at negative 20 when it's all said and done, and you would make much different decisions on what you activate in this plan based on that.

Erik Martinez: I think that's a really important point that, you know, a lot of times we ask our [00:29:00] customers, "What's your profit formula?" Just, at least give us the the high level, right? Where are your big costs, what are your costs of goods sold?

We work on a lot of e-commerce. With our lead gen clients it's a different conversation. But what are your costs? And, what are the metrics that you need to be successful?

It's amazing to me even in today's age that there's still a lot of people who don't know. And it's very complicated and like at some point we've gotta have a simple profit formula. Right? We've gotta know on the average. This is the way it works. Certain product lines might have more costs than other product lines.

I totally understand that. But we have to have that least framework to start from. That allows us some flexibility to work against and build against.

Corey Morris: What happens is we have so much data that we all overcomplicate this. I'm a classic person, overcomplicating this - guilty. We're both raising our hands here.

So, yeah. We call this our napkin math exercise because it should fit into 4, 3, 4, [00:30:00] 5 classic ROI inputs to calculate this. And if we've over calculate or over complicated it, it's gonna be really hard for us to measure it all the way through, get everybody to provide the inputs we need to be able to calculate it.

And then it's hard for us to constantly stay focused on that. But that's the balance to oversimplifying it or looking at the wrong KPI too. As you were giving that example a moment ago, I immediately started thinking about an e-commerce ROAS goals, right?

That's a good ratio metric, which we love to stay in because we know it can scale and it provides margin and it has margin factored into it. But how do we know the difference between 4 8, 12 16. If we're losing money on the other side, or there are other variables like costs go up or getting something into the United States now, just change if it changed overnight or back and forth.

So if we're not connected deep enough with our ROAS goal and dynamic enough with it [00:31:00] to the profitability goals, then you can think that, "Okay, we hit all of our goals, everything's green and up into the right as a marketer." Then find out you actually lost money and your company could have made different strategic decisions with all those inputs combined.

Erik Martinez: Yep, yeah. I had a client who just went through this exact problem.

They were spending so much money in marketing across all the channels that they overburdened the organization. Now, there were some other cost factors. They had huge freight loads and inventory that would cost twice as much because of the pandemic. And they had some other things that hit their business, tariffs.

And this was not this round of tariffs, it was the lots round of tariffs that really changed the economic. But the financial people didn't update that information for the marketing team.

Corey Morris: Yeah. Yeah. And that's painful

Erik Martinez: So it's like they're questioning why you're spending so much money and yet on the other hand, they're not giving you the information that you [00:32:00] need in order to manage the campaign.

Corey Morris: That hurts.

Erik Martinez: It very much hurt.

So, the START process, you've laid it out in a very specific way. Does it have to always be done that way or are there places where you can kind of shift some things around? Or is it really like the ideal - "Hey, we're gonna start with strategy, then we're go tactics, we're gonna activate, we're gonna review and we're gonna transform."

Is it always that process?

Corey Morris: It's typically in that order because it builds on the previous steps. You don't want to create the assets or how you're gonna apply the strategy or tactics without knowing what the final set of tactics are. And you shouldn't be, my opinion, but strong opinion, you shouldn't be setting a set of tactics without them being connected to that strategy.

So really I often say, "The strategy gives you the lens that you're looking through to apply the rest of the phases."

Now, the review phase, some of those parts you're touching on early on in [00:33:00] strategy because you know what you have or don't have in terms of attribution or reporting and systems that are connected or tactically you may already start blending into what assets you might need or have or not have.

Or you might catch yourself if you get too far too fast of, "Hey, we're not in the asset phase." Or, you know, looking at what assets we need. But like we talked about a moment ago, changes our math because we gotta go hire somebody to do that -we don't have that already covered. And so we need to go back and redo our ROI math or our opportunity or tactics.

So sometimes you take a couple steps forward to take a step back or revisit something. That's just the risk if you start at the end of the process and go backwards, you're gonna end up having to make some of those decisions twice.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. So I think the process builds on itself throughout and it's not like you can't go revisit other pieces.

But basically skipping steps actually short changes the entire process.

Corey Morris: And in fact, I talk about sometimes where even though [00:34:00] this process is made to uncover any gaps, any issues get everything out on the table. If you clearly know that your brand is a mess. You don't have brand guidelines. Your product development is not totally done. I even say that those are your prerequisites to go through this process.

You don't need to be planning your marketing yet getting it out into the wild. You need to be getting that house in order first because you'll get stuck throughout the process because you won't have the messaging you need. You won't be able to plan assets that you don't know what they're even gonna look like.

Or sometimes, when we don't have the strongest brand guidelines or messaging or features and benefits and elevator pitch and things knocked out, that's when we get into disconnects where it's like, "Okay, well why did all these leads not qualify?" And the sales team, isn't qualifying the leads that came through for marketing.

Well, it's because we didn't have the right messaging in place, or we were making it up in the marketing department [00:35:00] as we went. Or another one would be, why are all these leads and all these opportunities beating us up over price? Or people coming and visiting the site and bouncing because when they get to the cart or see some of the fees or some of the product page pricing.

Because we didn't differentiate far enough upstream, so we were in a commodity mindset by that person who arrived on our website and they're wanting the low price leader, and unless we're selling on price and we want to be the low price leader. We didn't do enough to differentiate as they came through the funnel and they got all the way down here because we didn't have enough strong brand messaging and differentiating points further up in the funnel to weed out people before they became really expensive to work all the way through.

Erik Martinez: You know, you're talking about leads, but that is absolutely true in e-commerce too. It's actually more critical in e-commerce in some ways in my mind, because I think there's very few products that are so unique that are uniquely sold on just one place that you can't find a like [00:36:00] product or the exact same product somewhere else.

And so you have to really have a very clear message and brand value proposition to convey to the consumer like, "This is what we are, why we're here, and what we're gonna be able to do for you."

Corey Morris: There's a big difference even as a B2B buyer who's outfitting a new office right now, there's a big difference in how quickly and how price conscious I was for that trash can. It's a nice trash can, but it's a trash can versus those monitors or that TV that's gonna be in a conference room.

And so very different level of funnel. Even if I make the decision same day on the same website from the same vendor I am approaching it two different ways and we don't wanna accidentally put ourselves in a commodity bucket. If you attracted people who are looking for that low price widget and didn't educate them on how this is the smart technology.

I'll pick on the Mother's Day gift that my wife received the Ember mug [00:37:00] that keeps your beverage at the perfect temperature. There are a hundred knockoff things out there, but I went for the Ember one. I knew I wanted the brand. I was sold on the features and benefits. I'm sure I paid way more than I would have for those other retailer websites, and I'm not getting any kickback or endorsement from Ember for saying this.

But I knew what I wanted after doing some research. And was willing to pay for it and didn't question, I didn't even know what it cost. I knew I wanted it, didn't know what it cost yet. That wasn't a big deal when I got there versus, some of the others where it started with cost because they position themselves as a brand and you know, all the features and benefits and customer service that comes after.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, that totally makes sense. One last question. For marketers who are just beginning to adopt the digital marketing success plan process, what are some of the immediate actions or quick wins you recommend for generating momentum and achieving early success?

I think one of the key issues with planning [00:38:00] is because it is not necessarily a super fun process to go through all of it. I'm sure there's some quick wins that people can get. Some gratification that keeps propelling them down the path. So what are some of those?

Corey Morris: Yeah, so there are a few different ways that you can kind of slice this and stack the deck in your favor, if you will. And a couple of those, especially if you are new to a lot of these channels or are questioning whether you have the right mix of tactics out there.

So number one is if you're a CEO or in the C-suite, or have any decision making control over budgeting for marketing if you don't know what you're getting in terms of return on investment today. That's the immediate quick win you're gonna get. You're gonna start questioning everything.

Sometimes that can be really painful and you unwind and get down deep into things where you wish you had known this years ago and you wouldn't have been spinning on brand [00:39:00] terms or spinning on this tactic or channel.

But now you get to shine a flashlight on it by getting some of the attribution things worked out and you'll know immediately, whether it's working or not, and you can answer those questions for other stakeholders or your board or whomever. That's one perspective.

Another quick win though too, is if you're trying to prove the value and need for a budget. You don't have to create this whole integrative, massive enterprise level plan. You could start with a channel or two in the mix and start in a more lean and agile way where you researched it and you've taken it through the process, but you don't have to put all the tactics and channels on the table. You could start there, but then pick a couple to take a smaller more lean approach to start and see some quick wins and validate it before you take more of a full on integrated enterprise level approach.

Another way, whether it's in that lean single or two channel approach. Would be to [00:40:00] focus on just bottom of the funnel. Start right where you're already closer to a decision and making money, and then working on some of the heavier investments, the longer term nurturing that comes with top of the funnel and thought leadership that comes with it. For people who are in research mode.

So you want to tackle the bottom of the funnel and have that optimized and search generating revenue. And these aren't necessarily new things or unique to this planning process. This is where a lot of people start just even in one-off channel planning and digital marketing and have. But those approaches are still relevant in this and if it feels just too big that's often where I start.

Is say, "Okay, we can explore in the planning process what some of those look like, but let's still start narrower and go get some quick wins and then activate more as we go."

Erik Martinez: I think that's really smart. 'Cause the last thing you want to have happen is someone start the process and then stop. Because then you know that the outcome is uncertain.

Corey Morris: Well, you put too much [00:41:00] financial pressure on it from the start, right? That's always a good litmus test too. If we're spending our first dollars and or last dollars in any situation on marketing, that's not a good position to be in. Or if this is too new and big of a jump from budget wise, we spent 1% of our revenue and now we're gonna spend 10%.

That's a massive jump that maybe we didn't have to take all at once and we could have worked our way into. Held some of those dollars back. So we weren't just putting the pressure on ourselves to perform.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, absolutely. This is great Corey. This is fantastic. As we move the close, is there any last piece of advice you'd like to leave with listening audience?

Corey Morris: I would make sure you understand your numbers. If there's nothing else, take away from this conversation. Hopefully you're not having a panic attack. Hopefully you're not getting pissed off. If you don't know if marketing is working or not, especially digital marketing, now is as good a time as ever before more disruption comes and more channels and [00:42:00] platforms and ways to get found by your target audience emerge.

Now is the time to get it figured out. Get your house in order and not have it a guessing game or surprises to come down the road.

Erik Martinez: I think that's great advice.

Corey, what's the best way to reach you if somebody wants to reach out?

Corey Morris: Yeah, a couple different ways. The book, if you wanna find the book, the start planning process and resources related to that, it's called The Digital Marketing Success Plan. That's a long domain name so I've shortened it to thedmsp.com. And if you wanna grab a couple of the free resources, I mentioned like the funnel worksheet, those are totally free at thedmsp.com/blueprints, and you can reach out there with any questions on that website and get to me directly. Or if you're interested in anything on the agency side of things or having this process kind of done for you and led through it. You can find me at Voltage.Digital as well.

Erik Martinez: Voltage.Digital. We'll make sure all that's in the show notes. Corey, thank you for your time today. I really appreciate this is a great [00:43:00] conversation. I think you've built a fantastic process that everybody should start adopting, including myself.

Corey Morris: Appreciate it. Enjoyed being here, Erik. Always enjoy conversations together and look forward to the next one.

Erik Martinez: Sounds great, man. Well, that's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Thank you and have a great day.

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