The Leverage Way

Who is Leverage Marketing

Leverage Marketing is a digital marketing agency, created from the sale of a successful Software as a Service, lead generation company. The Leverage Marketing principals each have over 20 years of experience, starting, growing, running and selling companies. We have balanced the experience of our leadership team with an exceptionally talented group of digital marketers.

When we started Leverage Marketing, our goal was to build on 15+ years of lead generation, lead management and software development experience. We’ve channeled that experience to build a company that provides digital marketing services for companies planning to accelerate their growth.

Our Planning Process “The Leverage Way”

Planning is the key to successful and efficient execution. With our clients and the companies, we’ve built, we’ve always had more success and spent less money getting there when we’ve started with a well-researched plan.

We’ve also learned firsthand that planning is a process. The initial plan provides background, creates insight, establishes baselines, identifies priorities and charts an initial course of action.

Turning a plan into a process requires; monitoring and analyzing results, reacting to feedback, gathering new information and adjusting the “plan”.

Our planning process is called “The Leverage Way”. It is how we determine the best way to reach your digital marketing and company goals. We use it with all our clients, at all stages of our engagements.

The Leverage Way is a four-step process. Using this process, we are able to efficiently provide you with the digital marketing insights and answers you are looking for. The steps in the process are Audit, Analyze, Advise and Amplify. What follows is a brief description of each step.

Audit

The Audit step in The Leverage Way has two focal points. First, we learn as much as possible about a company. Secondly, we look at external factors. External factors include competitors, industry information and relevant technology.

During the Audit step in the process, we take an approach that allows us to get the information we need efficiently. This will include interviewing key people, a 360° review of your digital marketing presence (for example; advertising, analytics, conversion metrics, online presence) and extensive research that allows us to create an accurate picture of the competitive landscape.

Analyze

After completing our Audit, we look for targets of opportunity and gaps. A target of opportunity is the alignment of your strengths with a favorable marketplace situation.

We define a gap as a process with a suboptimal design, or results that impede profitable growth.
A few recent examples of potentially disastrous gaps that we have identified include broken check out procedures, faulty data tracking and critical cost per click forecasting errors. Identifying gaps and correcting them, can lead to the significant, cost effective top and bottom-line growth.

Advise

In the “Advise” step, we outline a course of action designed to take advantage of the opportunities and fill the gaps uncovered during the first two steps (Audit & Analyze) of The Leverage Way process.

Along with recommendations we will present the data, thought process and prioritize our recommendations.

Amplify

The “Amplify” step is our way of modeling our recommendations. We show you how we believe our recommended course of action will create business growth. We forecast results, channel by channel, to build a holistic view your digital marketing results.

Digital Marketing Plan (DMP)

For new clients, we use “The Leverage Way” not only to develop a Digital Marketing Plan, but as the foundation for our relationship. For existing clients, we use “The Leverage Way” to refresh our insights and challenge our existing plan of action.

While your Digital Marketing Plan will be unique and specific to your business, there are common areas that we cover and common procedures that we use.

Below is a detailed explanation of how Leverage Marketing will approach building your Digital Marketing Plan, using the Leverage Way Process.

Digital Marketing Plan – Overview

While there are numerous ways to think about Digital Marketing. At Leverage Marketing, we break digital marketing down into three components. Infrastructure, Organic Marketing and Paid Marketing. Here is a brief description and examples of how we see these categories

Infrastructure – Infrastructure includes technology, people or processes that support a company’s digital marketing effort. Typically, this is your website, blogs, social media accounts, reporting tools, shopping cart, CRM software, APIs that connect you with data about your digital activity and the people that use these tools.

Organic Marketing – One simple way of defining Organic Marketing is to define it by what it is not. Organic Marketing does not involve a payment for a specific result (impression, click, form fill, or other action). Examples of organic marketing activities include search engine optimization, content development, email marketing, social media marketing and influencer marketing.

Paid Marketing – Paying for an ad, or direct payments tied to a specific action is paid marketing. Pay Per Click marketing, Display Advertising, paid social media, affiliate networks are all examples of paid marketing.

Digital Marketing Plan – Audit

The objective of the audit is to gather relevant information from inside and outside the company. During the audit step, we are also establishing a baseline for your data collection process.

To conduct the audit, we use questionnaires, interviews, and access to your marketing tools (Google Analytics, AdWords, CRM, email marketing software, etc.) we assign a team of experts to gather the information they need to formulate a digital marketing strategy and plan for your company. The areas we review include:

• Audience Research
• Backlink Analysis
• Competitive Landscape
• Content Analysis
• Data Tracking
• Display Advertising
• Goal Tracking
• Google AdWords
• Google Analytics
• Industry Research
• Keyword Research
• Market Research
• Paid Search Accounts
• Remarketing
• Site Quality Analysis
• Social Media Accounts
• Technology Review

Digital Marketing Plan – Analyze

The “Analyze” step in the process of developing your Digital Marketing Plan has two stages. The first is the integration of internal and external findings, the second is a gap analysis.

Integrating internal and external data involves synthesizing competitive research with your company’s activities and results, across numerous areas including:

• Ad Copy
• Ad Extensions
• Analysis of your PPC Activity
• Bid Strategies
• Competitive organic keyword visibility
• Competitor’s Paid Search Budget
• Content
• Conversion rate optimization
• Digital Metrics (CTR, CPA, CAC, LTV)
• Email Marketing
• Local SEO
• Mobile integrity
• Organic traffic
• Quality Score
• Remarketing
• Result Tracking
• Review Management
• Schema Markup
• Scalability
• Social Media Ad Strategy Analysis
• Social Media target audience
• Social Media competitive analysis
• Social Media Reach and Frequency
• Target Audience
• Technical SEO review
• Topic Development
• Website
• Website extensions
• Website traffic conversion

The gap analysis compares your company’s performance across the reviewed areas, to benchmarks, industry standards and in many cases your direct and indirect competitors. As we conduct the gap analysis we identify opportunities, threats and strategies for a successful Digital Marketing Plan.

Digital Marketing Plan – Advise

Translating our research and analysis into a plan, is how we “Advise” your company. The Digital Marketing Plan will initially prioritize filling gaps and strategies for opportunistic growth. Following this initial strategy, we will focus on building areas of excellence and scaling the business.

The plan that we present will include an overview, along with detailed plans, for each digital marketing tactical area.

Potential Digital Marketing Plan tactics:

• Technology Enhancements
• Content Development
• Search Engine Optimization
• Email Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Paid Search implementation/optimization

Digital marketing tactical plans will be included as needed, based on their contribution to achieving your company’s objectives.

Digital Marketing Plan – Amplify

The “Amplify” step in The Leverage Way process is where we show the estimated impact of implementing our recommendations. We will break down the impact by tactical area. It is important to note that the results achieved at the tactical level, are dependent on each other. For example, the paid search results depend on a solid SEO strategy. The SEO strategy is dependent on a solid content strategy. Most tactics are dependent on a strong email marketing campaign. Very little is possible without accurate and complete data tracking.

Technology

Our technology focus is about improving your conversion rate optimization and presenting solutions to tech infrastructure issues that may undermine your digital marketing plan. In short, we want to help you plug leaks and grease your sales funnel.

The areas we have found issues that are impeding or can accelerate a company’s digital marketing results are:

• Website UI
• Click Paths
• Analytics Set Up
• API Integrations
• Marketing Automation
• 3rd Party Tracking
• Onsite Forms
• XML Sitemap
• Robots.txt file
• Page Load Speed
• Site Security
• Site Backups

Without making needed corrections, or taking advantage of low/no cost, high impact additions to your “tech”, you are increasing the cost of achieving your digital marketing goals.

In our Amplify – Technology step, we will show you where you have technical issues that can be cleaned up, to improve the results of your digital marketing plan.

Content Strategy

A good content strategy makes everything easier. SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing will all experience increased results if your content strategy; connects with your audience, is consistent, has purpose, connects people to your brand/offer and creates interest.

An exceptional content strategy will establish your company as a thought leader and improve your company’s credibility. The result is increasing the number of entry points to your site, earning new visitors and increasing the number of prospects entering your sales funnel.

If your messaging is relevant, timely and interesting, your prospects will be easier to convert. The Amplify – Content step of your Digital Marketing Plan will include a Content Strategy and the types of content we would start with. Recent content types have included

• Blog Posts
• Service Pages
• Product Categories
• Case Studies
• White Papers
• Infographics
• eBooks
• Buying Guides

With or without a content strategy, your content defines who you are to your prospects and customers. Having a game plan lets you define yourself, extend your reach and have a positive starting point in your relationship with prospects.

Search Engine Optimization

The impact of our SEO campaign will be to remove technical roadblocks that prevent proper rankings, increase organic visibility and traffic to the site, decrease the cost per acquisition, improve brand awareness, improve engagement metrics, and improve the conversion rate of the site.

The aim of SEO is to holistically improve a site for visitors and to demonstrate to search engines the relevance, utility and quality of the site. This holistic approach has a significant impact on conversion rate, PPC quality scores, email subscription rate, keyword visibility and provides a keyword strategy to be used in content generation.

Our SEO campaigns touch many aspects of the site including:

• Content Optimization and Quality
• Keyword Targeting
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Blogging Strategy
• Backlink Portfolio Improvement
• Site Indexation
• Search Result Listing Improvement
• Local Business Listing
• Schema Markup and Rich Snippets

The selection of these key tactics is determined by what opportunities are uncovered during the Analysis stage of the process.

In our Amplify – SEO step, we will project the additional organic visits we expect to drive to the site and the impact of this additional traffic on conversions and revenue.

Social Media

A relatively new major marketing channel, social media can destroy or supplement your digital marketing efforts. Controlling your message is a requirement. To be effective, you need an efficient delivery system, purposeful posts and the ability to take advantage of the unique tools presented by various social media channels.

The Amplify – Social Media step of our process will show you how we plan to; protect your reputation, grow, engage and motivate your audience to buy and track results. Our social media effort is dependent on the proposed content, paid media and technology strategies.

We will show you how we believe our social media plan can impact your business. Our social media efforts will most likely be focused on one or more of the following areas.

• Content Planning & Publishing
• Engagement & Moderation
• Advocacy & Audience Segmentation
• Paid and targeted Amplification
• Listening and Trend Discovery
• Analytics and reporting

Effective use of social media can impact traffic volume, quality, conversion rates and customer acquisition costs. The Amplify -Social Media step will show a baseline and targets for key performance indicators.

Paid Search

Paid search is an established marketing channel for online advertisers. Changes happen rapidly and your campaign efforts need to move proactively while staying aligned with your business goals. Our PPC management focuses on looking at marketing channels through their impact on the sales funnel to understand the full value. We take that insight and use it to maximize lifetime value, optimize the marketing mix, and drive long-term business growth. Our paid search management areas focus on the following areas.

• Account Structure
• Campaign Optimization
• Custom Attribution Modeling
• Business goal based bid optimization
• Down-channel revenue tieback for lead-generation business
• Lifetime Value based management approach
• Analytics and reporting

The projected impact of our Paid Search strategy will include estimated metrics from clicks to revenue, based on either an advertising budget, a business objective or a combination of both.