Famed war strategist, Sun Tzu, once said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.” Many companies start first with tactics, assuming that doing more of what they have always done will magically correct their problems. Others try a new idea here or there just to see if it works. The key to long-term success is to “diagnose before you prescribe.” Strategy without tactics leads to a slow victory, however, strategy combined with the right tactics can lead to quantum changes in an organization’s results.

Cartography Digital’s Marketing Strategy process analyzes three key areas of your business:

Segmentation and Positioning

In Marketing, the more you try to mean everything to everyone, the more you mean nothing to no one. Cartography Digital will analyze your competitors, your unique position in the market, and identify those who care most about your offerings. We will then develop the plan to reach the right audiences at the right time with the right message.

Customer Journey

Your customers go through 6 distinct phases when engaging with your business: Discover, Investigate, Engage, Purchase, Re-Purchase, and Advocate. At each one of these phases, your organization has specific touchpoints that may either move the customer down the pathway to evangelism or may drive them to a competitor. Cartography Digital analyzes your specific customer journey, spots any gaps, and makes recommendations for creating a world-class customer experience. For more information on our customer journey mapping, click here. [Link to the approach page]

Product Innovation

Cartography Digital will help identify where your organization has innovation potential and where it does not. We will delve into your company’s innovation potential by identifying what technology resources are available within and without the organization and use these to drive innovative thinking and products. Consumers not only want superior products, but new value creation streams beyond the feature set, including integration, product acquisition, and social integration.

In an ever increasing digital world, content is king, queen, and the entire court. Many marketing channels are beginning to converge, including organic search, public relations, email, and social media, all held together by content. In most cases, consumers will see your content long before they visit your website. Cartography Digital helps you develop a strategy to create, share, and supplement content in order to build an audience, create thought leadership, and increase your “findability.” Your content strategy includes conducting a content audit that identifies what content currently exists (both online or offline), creating an editorial calendar to determine what content will be created and by whom, building an aggregation plan to determine what websites and keywords will be leveraged for supplemental content, and developing a media database for sharing content and building links.

Over the last 10 years, social media has seen an explosion of growth. Today, it has become an integral part of our lives. It has also simplified audience targeting and provided a new toolbox for engaging with consumers. As pioneers in social media marketing, the team at Cartography Digital will help you develop a strategy to reach the right audiences at the right time with the right message, no matter what platform they prefer. This includes both paid audience engagement as well as organic audience engagement and community management. These tools work hand-in-hand to drive results for your organization.

Consumers use search engines during two key steps in the customer journey: when they are researching alternatives and when they are ready to buy. If your organization is not found when your audience is looking, you don’t even get a shot at winning the initial business, let alone the lifetime value of that customer. Search strategy begins with identifying the keywords for which you want to be found. Once we identify your most important keywords, we develop both your paid and organic search strategies for reaching your audience. ur organization.

While email is considered by many to be an antiquated form of digital marketing, it is still one of the most effective methods for capturing and nurturing audiences. In fact, research shows that for every $1 a company invests in email marketing, they’ll see a $21 return. Email strategy begins with cleaning your current lists and mapping your existing process. We then identify your audience segments, craft content ideas that will appeal to each, identify ways to capture new leads, and develop a schedule for nurturing and converting those leads.

How do you know if you are successful unless you first, define success and second, measure success? Most organizations default to sales or profits, but these are like trying to drive a car by staring in the rear view mirror – they all happen in the past. The key is to identify measurements that will predict future success and to monitor those consistently. Cartography Digital will help you identify your key lead measures and then we will bring data from multiple sources into a single marketing dashboard to help you make the right decisions at the right time.