Traditional Digital Marketing Is Broken, Introducing Growth-Driven Digital Marketing

Traditional Digital Marketing Is Broken

If you’ve had digital marketing services in the past, you’ll be familiar with how most agencies deliver services.

The Broken Digital Marketing Cycle

1. SERVICE SELECTION: The digital marketing agency has you select from a menu of services which options you want.
2. ONBOARDING: With minimal input from you, they begin delivering these services. If you have multiple services, these are typically delivered in isolation (often completed by different people who don’t collaborate on an overall strategy). During the onboarding process, you are contacted several times and you feel confident that progress is being made.
3. REPORTING: If the agency is above average, they will report back regularly on the results of these individual services. Usually, these reports have a lot of technical jargon and don’t tie back to your organization’s goals in any way. These results are meant to overwhelm you with data so you simply accept the results as “work completed” and don’t ask many questions about how they are actually impacting your business.
4. ONGOING FULFILLMENT: These services continue, never varying from what was initially selected, regardless of changes in technology, new opportunities, economic shifts, or changes within your organization. You are rarely consulted about service delivery. Over time your services become disassociated with your corporate goals. Eventually, perhaps with a staff change, budget cuts, or a change in strategy from management, you become disillusioned with your digital marketing agency, and services are cancelled. With new strategic needs, you switch to a different marketing agency hoping they will be able to meet your new needs.
5. RESTART THE CYCLE: With new organizational goals and possibly new staff, a new agency is selected and this entire process repeats itself.

This process has weaknesses at every step.

1. It starts without a detailed understanding of your needs and goals.
2. It relies on you to make choices on services that you may not fully understand, or at least are not well equipped to prioritize.
3. You are initially lulled into an expectation of high communication during onboarding but quick that communication drops off
4. Reporting is not connected to your goals and usually gives far too much technical data making it unclear which metrics you should be focusing on.
5. Often the results presented are not actionable or the key insights about the results are not clearly explained in a way that helps you make any decisions or evaluate the service effectiveness.
6. Services endlessly repeat without modification and quickly fall out of sync with your changing goals.

🙁 There has to be a better way.

There is. Meet Growth-Driven Digital Marketing (GDDM)

Growth-Driven Digital Marketing (GDDM) is a better way. Growth-Driven Digital Marketing (GDDM) borrows concepts from Growth-Driven Design (GDD), which is an agile, results-oriented approach to web design.

In collaboration with you, the GDDM team will strategically employ the right mix of digital marketing techniques for each cycle (usually a 1-3 month period). The team reports back to you with actionable results, and together we formulate a plan for the next cycle based on these results and the ongoing and changing needs of your organization. The solution mix is catered to your needs and budget and the GDDM team collaboratively works together on growing your business.

This gives the fulfillment team the flexibility to use your budget in the most effective way. Perhaps one month most of your budget may go towards PPC, but the next month, maybe there is some website conversion optimization needed so we divert some of the PPC funds to allow for that work to be completed. Or maybe some social media advertising would be most useful.

The idea is, you aren’t locked into a predetermined set of services that made sense at the outset of the engagement but now don’t make sense or make it difficult to pivot and deliver optimal services. Rather, based on the ongoing analysis of how everything is performing and what is most needed we have the flexibility to use the full arsenal of digital marketing services to best serve you.

Want to learn more, or get started? Contact us, we’d love to learn about your needs.