Roadmapping your digital strategy can be a challenging process. To start, how do you decide the types of content you will produce, the social media networks to target, and the web assets to leverage?

The answer is to gather and use data to make fact-based marketing decisions. The data you gather – your marketing fact base – is the perfect foundation for your digital strategy roadmap.

In this article, we’ll first make sure you clearly understand what a ‘marketing fact base’ is, and why you need one. Then, we’ll talk about the four most important elements of your marketing strategy, and how they inform (and are informed by) your fact base.

Let’s get started!

What is a marketing fact base and why should you use one

A marketing fact base is a collection of data turned into information. It consists of quantitative measurements and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that provide a factual basis for future decision making.

A marketing fact base typically includes an evaluation of your business’ digital capabilities, along with information about past online marketing successes and failures. It is used to establish clear marketing goals and to help build a roadmap to meet those goals.

In a nutshell, a fact base supports the creation of a digital roadmap by giving marketers real-world data on which to base decisions and formulate a marketing strategy.

The benefits of using a marketing fact base

A marketing strategy forged from a fact base can help your business in many ways.

1. It ensures your marketing strategy is based in reality, and not wishful thinking.
2. It helps build consensus by providing an objective foundation for decision making.
3. It differentiates between dead ends and opportunities.
4. It makes it easier to sell marketing strategies to top management, since decisions are based on fact and not feeling.

So now you know why you need a fact base, but the question remains: How will a fact base help you build a marketing strategy roadmap?

4 key tips for roadmapping your digital strategy

Your roadmap should include at least four primary elements: web assets, content strategy, social media, and technology. While your strategy may include additional elements, virtually every digital marketer’s strategy will include these four at a minimum.

Let’s take a look at each element.

1. Make the most of your web assets

The first step in developing a successful marketing strategy is to understand the web assets you have at your disposal, and how they can be used to support your business goals. Start by cataloging all of your web assets, at least informally. While your list of assets will be unique to your business, in most cases it will include things such as:

• Your website.
• Your content: blog posts, articles, formal documentation, videos, interviews, illustrations, images, and infographics.
• Social media accounts and followers.
• Branding elements such as logos and graphics.
• Online coverage on other websites, in blogs, and in videos.

Your marketing fact base should tell you the value of each of these assets – the traffic generated by your website, the effectiveness and relative freshness of your content, your social media followers and typical post interactions, and much more. All of these metrics should be simple to obtain, making it easy to get started.

The goal here is to get to grips with the assets at your disposal, and to make sure that you’re using them to their full potential based on the factual data available to you.

2. Develop a content strategy

In the digital age, there’s no escaping the content generation. Google rewards it, and your website visitors demand it.

When developing a content strategy, base it on what you know. Look past your raw data and figure out the types of content that generates the most page views, converts the most visitors, and provides the most long-term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) value. Then simply base your content strategy on the facts.

It’s important to understand that your content ultimately serves two purposes:

1. To provide long-term SEO value and thereby increase organic traffic.
2. To build a body of knowledge and demonstrate expertise within a specific realm, and to use that expertise and knowledge to enhance your brand.

When your content serves these two purposes – and serves them well – your brand is enhanced. This in turn has the reciprocal benefit of enhancing the value of all of your web assets, not just your content. In other words, effective content strategy is the fuel that makes all of your web assets more desirable and valuable.

3. Implement a social strategy

Social media is vital to the success of virtually every digital marketing campaign. However, what may be lost in the shuffle is the need to thoughtfully prioritize the effort and capital invested into each social network. This is a mistake that a fact base can easily correct.

Your fact base can help you determine the value of each social network based on the user engagement generated by each account. You can also take things a step further and determine if different types of content perform better on different platforms.

Use this information to develop a social media strategy that makes the most of your web assets by maximizing the impact of the time and capital invested in each platform.

4. Leverage technology to improve effectiveness

With the vast amount of data and information at your disposal, you’re making a huge mistake if you don’t take the time to strategize your use of technology. Technology can help you get better at doing two things:

1. Gathering data for your marketing fact base.
2. Automating marketing outreach efforts to get more done.

You may already be up to speed when it comes to gathering detailed data about website traffic using Google Analytics. However, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

On the premium end of the spectrum, social media tools such as Hootsuite make social media outreach easier, and HubSpot makes marketing management and outcome measurement a breeze. In addition, a wide range of free online tools are available to help you gather and analyze detailed data – Piwik and Open Web Analytics are just two examples worth taking a look at.

We couldn’t possibly list all of the tools that are available to digital marketers, so your own research will be key. The goal is to make sure you’re gathering the data you need to make fact-based marketing decisions, and to leverage the technology to make the most of your marketing budget and assets.

Conclusion

Developing a thoughtful, data-driven digital roadmap will ensure that your marketing budget goes further, and your efforts are as effective as possible. The key is to build your marketing roadmap by addressing the four key components of every digital marketing strategy:

1. Catalog your web assets and build a fact base that will help you get the most out of each asset.
2. Create a content strategy based on what has worked best in the past using data culled from your marketing fact base.
3. Leverage social media intelligently – prioritizing the most effective networks – to make the most of your web assets and to support content distribution.
4. Leverage technology to get more done and gather data to support future fact-based decision making.