The Project and The Goals
IMO had come to Solid Digital to recreate their website, after a full product reconfiguration required a reimagined online presence and a stunning new website. After the new website was complete, approved, and launched (and celebrated well), it didn’t take long for both IMO and Solid Digital to realize the party couldn’t end just yet–there was still work to do.
The team at IMO that first approached Solid Digital had significant marketing talent and knowledge, paired with medical know-how. IMO possessed a hunger to improve, and a desire to show the importance of marketing within the medical tech space. And with IMO’s Precision Sets, it was important to continue their growth and attain strategic goals, which included leveraging their brand new website to attract and convert users, measure their marketing success, and grow their marketing team in both budget and staffing.
That’s when Solid Digital’s trademark move, Digital Growth™, came into play, to lay the right foundation for their marketing efforts
Results (The Expected & Unexpected)
The IMO team trusted the process of Digital Growth and believed that they, along with the help of Solid Digital, could create and complete the operating and building strategies within their team, making for a stronger marketing team than ever before, both in size (increasing from 3 staff members to 15) and in efficacy (IMO’s Digital Value went from a negative number to 57 after two years). Also with the Digital Growth program, IMO saw:
- Traffic to blog pages up 638% ytd
- Target market accounts engaged up 162% ytd
- Marketing team growth: 300%+ (since 2019)
These numbers are so impressive, that the VP of Marketing at IMO has internalized the Digital Value idea, and shares IMO’s monthly Digital Value metric as a type of marketing proof to the leadership team. What once was difficult to explain, is now boiled down to a figure that’s understood and applauded.
The Process (Growing Pains Don't Have to Hurt)
Digital Growth,™ Solid Digital’s exclusive formula for identifying and improving a company’s Digital Value, employs a specific process, guided by our worksheet and reports, which focuses on tracking and using key performance metrics (KPMs) through three defined steps:
- Clarify larger business objectives
- Define a set of measurable KPIs
- Establish accountability, build habits & track progress
Beyond simply handing over a worksheet and bidding IMO “goodnight and good luck”, Solid Digital came alongside IMO in a consultation and coaching/training role, holding the marketing team members accountable for assigned tasks, digestible steps, and building [good] habits. For IMO, the Digital Growth process began in 2019, and the results positively exploded over the next two years. But how did they get there?
The Approach (Step by Step)
- Learn Because IMO was a client of Solid Digital’s already, their brand, audiences, and overall company information came from the Learn and Discover portion of the website redesign work. For this phase of Digital Growth, Solid dug deeper for insight into IMO’s digital marketing strategies: Which channels they were utilizing? What kind of content was being pushed through? After understanding what was and wasn’t being done and what was and wasn’t working with their current plan, a strategy could emerge.
- Strategize The marketing department and Solid Digital came up with an agreed-upon strategy, with metrics to back it and action items to support it. The initial objective was to increase organic visibility to serve three key objectives: Point of pride Thought leadership A measurable contribution toward a specific percentage of year-over-year revenue growth
- Create With Digital Growth, it’s vital to set up for growth and establish new habits. The early action items must be low effort, high impact. For IMO, this included reviewing their top 10 keywords, identifying which priority keywords could be used within their product pages, and creating an FAQ blog post that was SEO-friendly and tailored to answer their most common queries.
- Grow In the final phase of Digital Growth, results must be assessed, measured, innovated, and optimized. In order to serve this, monthly meetings were held to score the company’s digital value. The monthly meetings easily showed the collaborative partnership between IMO and Solid Digital, with either team taking on what the other could not. A quarterly meeting helped the teams strategize and determine action items for the next quarter to keep the momentum going.
Challenges (Nothing We Can't Overcome Together)
Pain points, also called negative forces, are always part of the initial Digital Growth strategy meeting. The challenges IMO presented during the Digital Growth program were varied, but not insurmountable, including:
- Lack of sufficient bandwidth due to the small size of their marketing team
- Not enough content being produced
- Issues with keywords (i.e. high volume of keywords didn’t directly relate to their goals)
In order to tackle these challenges, the IMO and Solid Digital teams set their eyes on the prize: a higher Digital Value–consistently–to create real growth.
Working Together (Get Off the Couch!)
A considerable amount of teamwork both within the company and with Solid Digital helps Digital Growth become a successful program. Solid Digital acted as a trainer, keeping IMO accountable for the tasks and goals they set out to complete and attain. With IMO doing much of the work, it was still vital for the tasks to be shared and split between the two teams when IMO didn’t have the bandwidth or manpower (before they reached the next growth spurt).
What Came Up (Whack-A-Mole)
As IMO worked through its tasks, began to grow its team, and started building habits, other priorities began to pop up. All the tracking of conversions, organic visitors, keyword rankings, and number and frequency of blog posts, began to point towards new markets and new needs for the website and the content it provided. At the beginning of the Digital Growth program, IMO leaned on Solid Digital for many of its tasks, but became nearly self-sufficient as their marketing team and budget grew, and it became more operationally aligned with digital marketing.
Solutions (It’s Handled)
The key of Digital Growth is self-awareness (know your digital value), the creation of consistent content (get into good habits), and tracking everything (“what gets measured gets done!”). The solution for IMO in this sense, was to drastically increase their digital value through creating consistent, intentional content. Along with more content, came more opportunities to: 1) be found by Google; 2) call users to action; and 3) be viewed as a thought leader in the healthcare technology space. This regular content creation became a habit, and now IMO posts as many as 20 new pieces of content each month.
More recently, Solid Digital has helped IMO relaunch and rebuild pages and rewrite messaging around products and keywords to target an expanding audience, with a clear focus on the site architecture, guiding specific users through a particular funnel to complete a user journey. These needs arose out of the company’s marketing-fueled growth. Because IMO took Digital Growth seriously, they became the gold standard for other clients, proving our hypotheses correct at every assessment.
More about Digital Growth™
Who is it for?
There is often a trigger point leading a marketing leader to either redesign a website (which can precede Digital Growth) or to seek the help of a digital marketing agency. In either case, any company with a commitment to growth, a marketing website that serves as the hub of all digital marketing activities and a marketing team committed to pushing forward can benefit from the structure Digital Growth provides.
What does it do for a brand?
Digital Growth helps a company become a marketing-driven organization through building habits, maintaining focus, and helping move the right levers. And when everything clicks in, the company will see growth–more than ever before.
What does it require from a company?
Digital Growth will need buy-in from the top down. We work with marketing leaders to make sure the executive team is on board and approves the program for the marketing team to complete. We’ll be working closely together, and coaching you every step of the way. There’s no magic pill–it will take time, human capital, growth, and investment.
Why is it a long-term solution?
You get out what you put in. If you put in consistent effort like IMO, you have the opportunity to see results. Remember the age-old adage, give a man a fish, feed him for a day…? Well, consider Digital Growth to be our version of teaching you to fish–one good habit can beget another. The results and growth you can see are all part of the consultancy and partnership aspect, with a figure (hello, Digital Value) that can show your executive team the positive results of your marketing efforts, giving you the leverage to grow your team or request a larger marketing budget.
