What Is the EMB Roadmap Report and Why Do You Need One ASAP
“All you need is a plan, the roadmap, and the courage to press on to your destination.” - Earl Nightingale
Such is true in life and in marketing. When you have a roadmap to marketing, you know how to get from where you are to where you want to go, and what key performance indicators (KPIs) to set along the way to measure your success.
EMB has created a data-driven approach to digital marketing that takes a deep dive into what your competitors are doing and how we can make you stand out. This process helps truncate the ramp-up period it normally takes from engagement to execution in a deliberate and tactical way.
What's a Roadmap to Marketing?
You’ve built something unique and exciting and you want to share it with the world, but how you share it can make or break your brand. Instead of guessing what will work and what won’t, we license best-in-class software to provide you with data-driven insights into your website and social channels as well as your competitors’ website and social channels. This way, we understand you, your competitors and your industry and can create a roadmap from A to B.
Why Do You Need a Roadmap?
These foundational pieces create specific KPIs that allow us to define how to measure success together. With clearly defined marketing goals and budgets, as well as access to your social channels, website CMS and analytics, we can strategize the right approach that moves your digital marketing efforts forward. Once we have recommendations in place for your brand, our team drops those into a custom scope of work (SOW) that is broken out into a menu of services with defined timelines, project phases and transparent pricing.
What Goes into a Roadmap Report?
As soon as we receive your competitors and all appropriate backend access, our software starts to crawl as much data as possible. For one, it looks into the health of your website, making sure there are no errors, warnings or notices that need to be addressed. We also take a look at your backlinks to ensure there are no bots, broken links, etc. and that the links to your site are non-toxic and actually improve your SEO. We then review your keywords as well as your competitors’ keywords to determine what words they are using, how often they are using them, and how much they may be spending. Lastly, we review your social channels and your competitors’ social channels to see which platforms we recommend your brand is present on and how to use those platforms to your advantage.
Thirty days from the date we receive your info, all of our findings are put into a detailed report, which we present in a one- to two-hour meeting where you can ask questions and learn more about your own digital universe.
What Does NOT Go into a Roadmap Report?
In branding, knowing who you aren’t is as important as knowing who you are. The same goes for our Roadmap process. So now that you know what does go into our Roadmap, let's outline a few things that don't. Why? Because each Roadmap report is unique to the client's brand, there are so many directions we can go. We want to make sure we are managing expectations and putting guardrails around deliverables so everyone is on the same page.
- Our Roadmap does not include a full marketing plan. Think about it this way: the report tells you which cities to visit and how to pack, but it doesn't plan the itinerary. That level of planning comes later once you sign an SOW. If you move forward with us, we will of course fold our recommendations into your digital marketing strategy.
- Our Roadmap does not include execution. Each Roadmap comes with a custom SOW that acts as a menu of services. It can be scaled up or down, and it shows you what pieces we need to execute to get you from Point A to Point EMB. This way, you can take your report and execute the recommendations in whichever way is most cost-effective for your team—even if that's not with us. (But we hope it's us!)
- Our Roadmap does not include sales data. Marketing isn’t sales. It's about building relationships en masse and creating top-of-funnel awareness, so while we may show you some e-commerce data from Google Analytics, we don’t dig into sales data. Plus, that’s proprietary information, meaning we can’t pull the same data for your competitors.
How Does a Roadmap Benefit Your Brand?
This detailed report will give you insights and necessary information that you won’t find anywhere else. This information will, in turn, help us create a comprehensive marketing strategy and campaign direction based on factual data and not on feelings. Not only does this allow you to move forward quickly with in-depth knowledge of what is happening in your industry, but it’s also an incredible tool to use for fundraising. Many of our Roadmap clients share their proprietary Roadmap report with their investors and stakeholders.
So why do you need a Roadmap ASAP? It’s simple. The numbers don’t lie and this report gives us all the numbers we need to define the right way for your brand to move forward with your digital marketing efforts. We are here to help you stand out instead of blending in to what everyone else in your industry is doing. We are here to elevate your brand, and this is the first step on that journey.