Debbie:So what are the building blocks for building an on a digital marketing strategy? Let’s talk a little bit about that. what are some of the building blocks that you put in place for Implementation.com when you were building their digital marketing strategy?

Mike: So the interesting thing is the preconceived notions I had about what the building blocks were. You know, you do one thing and it’s great, then you realize there are many tactics that are required to have an effective marketing strategy and implementation. So, my lack of knowledge, luckily was supplemented by Bob because we would have done just one thing expecting good results and we are, in fact, before he came on board we did and there were no results, you know, simply send emails and hope you get something back. And we found you have to do other things to actually bring a lead in.

Debbie:And digital marketing is so organic, it just keeps growing and growing. So you need the design aspect, the new content aspects, the web site aspect. So can you speak to that a little bit, Bob?

Bob:Yeah, it’s actually Mike hit the nail on the head, you know, it’s classic, right? And Steve Jobs said it, if you ask the customer what they want, they don’t know, you know, and what they need until you’re in the mix of it. So basically you a has to come in. So what we tried to do, as you know, Debbie, because you produce so much of our content is we try to educate like webinars like this or a podcast like this. We try to educate folks. So, when we started discussing with Mike initially, with what the problem areas where we were looking at things like, okay, where is the business and where it should be going and not at a tactical level.

And then based on your business goals and what you want the company to be in the next one year, two years, five years down the road, then you can actually devise a plan. Most people try to go very tactic happy, but instead, if you look at objectives and goals and then backtrack it and reverse engineer it, that’s the way the approach I took with, Mike when we started discussing it. And you know, exactly right. So most of the times you think it’s, you know, we are spending money on paid search or paid advertising, so we need to do better. But sometimes people don’t know that that’s not what you need to do; you need to build up your organic presence; you need to build up your content. So your reliance on paid advertising is less, so essentially that’s what Mike is trying to refer to.

But you know it, since you asked about this, and we went over this yesterday while we were prepping for this, this is some of the building blocks that you start with, at the very foundation is your infrastructure. You know, like your automation platforms. If you have it, if you are in a B3B lead Gen model, then your automation platform is very critical. You know, and if you to go on Kugel, the most common question is, which is the best automation platform? Should I choose Hubspot or Marketo or hide a or whatever the other smaller vendors are or other costs in some cases. So infrastructure is critical. Once you have that. Then the second piece of digital marketing is what we like to call it, the tactical side of it. You are, so your social, your email, things like that. And then after that, we worked with Mike and his team to think of a lead nurturing and the lead generation campaign in B2B, it’s all about lead nurturing, right? And then at the end of the day, the goal for Implementation Engineers was not to do some tactics and some bells and whistles with some new website where it was to align with sales and marketing to close more deals and generate more leads. You know. So these are some of the building blocks that we see in B2B. Mike, am I on right? You were on this point.

Mike:Yeah, correct. And I actually, the first building block that we had was a sales marketing alignment. So we got together to make sure we were on the same page because you know, if we’re doing marketing activities and sales isn’t aligned, they’re the ones that are going to go out and try to bring the customers in. So that was really important for the approach was us sitting to get together with a sales team and figuring out, you know, what are we going to do as a company? Where are we going, where is our growth going to be, where are we going to target? And so, um, that messaging was important, right from the start. And that’s really the first thing that we did.