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Corey Morris is an experienced industry speaker, best-selling author, and the owner and leader of VOLTAGE digital marketing agency. His new book, The Digital Marketing Success Plan, was published in July 2024 and details why companies need a documented, objective, and accountable digital marketing plan in today's era of unprecedented change in the digital marketing industry. He provides the context for why having a plan is important, shares real stories, and includes "how-to" content for creating and implementing a plan, leveraging his five-step START Planning process.

 

In this episode, Jason and Corey discuss:

  • Importance of strategic focus and aligning tactics with business outcomes
  • Essentials of a defined strategy, articulated goals, and meaningful KPIs
  • Explanation of the START framework and its role in digital marketing success
  • Impact of AI on SEO, content creation, and audience engagement
  • Balancing present strategies with future innovations and emerging technologies

Key Takeaways:

  • A well-defined strategy, clear goals, and meaningful KPIs serve as the foundation for effective marketing, preventing wasted investments and ensuring focused execution.
  • The START framework emerges as a structured approach, guiding businesses through a five-step process to define, implement, and measure digital marketing success with precision.
  • Rather than fragmented efforts, aligning marketing tactics with overarching business strategy is emphasized as the key to driving meaningful and sustainable results.
  • A strategic balance is highlighted—leveraging proven successes while staying open to innovation ensures a future-proof digital marketing approach without sacrificing what already works.
  • Optimizing CRM usage and integrating marketing efforts can yield substantial revenue growth, turning well-planned marketing spending into measurable success.

 


“The thing that doesn’t change is investing in quality content and understanding your audience. If you’ve just been leaning on some personas and your brand, it’s probably time to get deeper.”

 - Corey Morris

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Listen to the podcast here:

Corey Morris- Digital Marketing Success Plan

Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight interviews. This is your host, Jason Abell, and I've got a guest today that when I first saw his name pop up on my schedule and did a little bit research, I got excited. The reason that I got excited is because I can't tell you how many of our coaching clients ask about marketing and the different things that they should be doing. So, I've got an expert today, Corey Morris. Listen to this. Corey is a speaker, Best Selling Author and owner of Voltage, which is a digital marketing platform, and the owner of Digital Marketing Success Plan, which is also a book that he wrote that we're going to talk about. Corey has won marketer of the year awards and is really a digital marketing expert. Corey, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

We're pumped to have you today, and we're going to talk about all things digital marketing, especially what you've got in the book and what you've been helping clients with these days, in light of all the different new technologies that are available, but the very first thing that I want to ask you is unrelated to digital marketing. It's the question that we ask all our guests on the Insight Interviews to open up the show, which is, who or what are you especially grateful for today, Corey?

I would have to say my family, with my team being a close second. Through some winter weather here in in my region, and the extended holiday break, you got a lot of family time, and going through, some car accidents and a lot of just life stuff in the past year, having that extended time off, while stressful at times, and needing the kids to be back in school, we enjoy it, and had a chance to kind of reset and re-engage a bit.

You know, I've asked that question a few 100 times, and every single time, I don't know, I just get a ton out of it. Just listening to you, you know, you and I did some pre-recording banter and talking ahead of time, but your answer, at least for me, I don't know about the listeners, but for me, just kind of centered me, because in a little microcosm, your answer was really life, right? Like there's good things that happen in life, there's not so good things that happen in life, but that's real life. And so anyways, thanks for your answer, man. I feel like we're grounded, and our space is cleared and we're ready to go with digital marketing. In that vein Corey, our listeners are comprised of business owners, C suite executives, top sales professionals, and I can't tell you how often we get asked from a coaching standpoint about marketing, and we're not marketing experts, but we're pretty good about asking insightful questions and pointing people in the right direction, but you are a digital marketing expert, and so maybe I'll open with a wide ranging question, and we'll kind of get deeper as our conversation goes on. Knowing who our audience is, what are the top things that you think that particular audience should know about digital marketing?

Yeah, it's sometimes tough love that I have to share with prospects, with clients, with colleagues who want the quick and easy, just tell me the one tactic to do and tell me what works for my company and my industry, and unfortunately, or fortunately, hopefully I'm not the fifth person they talked to five years into doing a lot of things that didn't work and a lot of money wasted, but in a lot of cases, I have to bring that bad news. But on the flip side, the opportunity to know what can work and could work and should work and will work for your target audience is important. I talk a lot about how Google will take your money, or Facebook or LinkedIn, or anyone else in an ad network. Agencies will take your money, or other consultants, software platforms will, whether it's working or not, and whether you're seeing meaningful ROI or not. I think the biggest challenge, as we all know, is engaging with our target audience and finding those right fit clients, instead of just casting the widest net possible, and unfortunately, a lot of those, hey, I heard about this tactic or this platform at a at a conference, let's try it, doesn't equal a strategy that's connected to marketing KPIs, and having marketing KPIs that are mapped to business outcomes.

Right on. Yeah. Well, okay, so that is the kind of womp, womp, uh oh. Gosh, at Rewire, we're an 11-year-old company and we got it wrong a ton, and I think we're only scratching the surface at getting it right. It sounds like our clients really fit in the same category. So, your answer is alluding to probably what the general population of business owners or people that are attempting to use marketing and digital marketing for their target audience have really skinned their knees along the way and so, okay, after the tough love, what comes next?

Yeah, so having a having a strategy, a defined strategy, not a strategy in someone's head, not having a list of tactics or a checklist or even a set of best practices to follow, but having a defined strategy that you can articulate, the rest of your team understands, any stakeholders understand with defined goals. And those defined goals don't need to be way deep in the weeds, but our goal is to grow by X number of top line revenue or net profit or whatever meaningful statistic, even if you're in a larger organization that's siloed and maybe you're not in control of all those numbers or you're not in charge of connecting the dots, getting as deep as you can and helping connect those dots to understand what moves the needle, so you don't invest in marketing for a year and look back on it and say, well, I think we did okay. Or someone who's cutting checks is like, well, let's just turn it off and see. That's the worst possible way to have to test it. The turn it off test.

Yep. So okay, I know enough about your system, The Digital Marketing Success Plan, and the book that you wrote, you've got an acronym in there called START, which I which I personally love. The first book that I wrote was called Start Now. That wasn't an acronym, it was to get people, specifically young adults, to start now, like start their goals and strategies. You're talking about things like that, but your START is an acronym. Does it make sense during this conversationto go into that? You know, I’m thinking about your plan defined strategy. Does it make sense to talk about your acronym at this point?

Yeah, let me give you the brief overview of it. So basically, where this came from is agencies, and listen, I'll be the first to say mine is not perfect and I'm not perfect. So, we still make mistakes today, but what we tried to do is learn from all of that and not just hold it close to the vest and use it as a secret tool or competitive advantage, what we realized is, the more we can put out there what our process is, even if our competitors want to steal it, there's nothing magical in it. There's hard work and collaboration in it, but to give our process away, to be able to do that, we first had to organize it and figure out how to make it approachable. So that's where we got it into, you know, a nice five step process. We were able to put an acronym on it, but basically, in a sense, it takes all those learnings and aspects of what we walk clients through, and I wanted to put it in a book and give it away for 10 or 20 bucks, and put it out there so people don't go through just that list of tactics, or waste money with people who are putting all their eggs in one basket. So, it starts with the first phase, connecting back to what I talked about a minute ago with strategy. So, the S is for strategy, and that phase, we go through a lot of auditing of where you are currently, we talk about things that marketers don't always feel comfortable talking about.

Like what? I’m intrigued.

They like to hide behind clicks and impressions and conversions and stay on our side of the table and throw you over a nice dashboard or report where everything is up and to the right and green, but I mentioned that those dots that aren't connected, so if I'm sharing this with someone who may have marketing in their title or may not, it's overwhelming. Many cases, it's pointless if we can't contextualize those KPIs to business outcome and ROI. So, getting everybody on the same page, what I've learned also, which is fascinating, is that we can be in an organization that's 50 years old, and people have been there 20 years, and five people have all worked together, and they use the same language, but they don't have the same definitions of those terms. So, even the inside baseball that I have to learn sometimes in new industries, to me, people are defining things differently or defining their goals for marketing. And so, you might have someone from different functions, from sales, from the C suite, from wherever, and they all have vastly different goals. So, getting on the same page sometimes seems most basic, but it's step one in terms of how we define what success is and what our goal is, and that allows us to set up in an easy way what our strategy is. Whether that's a paragraph that then layers down into more nuanced, but who we're trying to reach, what we want to do, what it's going to drive, and how that connects back to the business. From there, then we move into tactics. Unfortunately, often we'll come in and it's like, well, why are you doing these tactics? You know, the seven blog posts a month, three social posts a week, and it's like, well, you know, somebody said we should, or that's a best practice, or we've been doing that since before I came here, and that's the expectation. We challenge all of that to say, you know, why spend money and effort, time and resources on things if they're not connected back to that strategy? So, having that strategy defined lets us put all tactics on table, challenge those existing but go do projections. Look at all the different ad networks, whether it's Google ads or organic search, which is a whole different topic of how that's evolving with AI, but email and automation. Go look at our strategy and look at our lists and understand where our target audience is. Social channels that maybe we didn't even consider before. If you're B to B, why would you do Facebook? I don't know, but we should definitely take a look at it at least, or figure out if there are cross channel opportunities to remarket to people and open up other potential opportunities, and do some projections around that to understand what our potential investment in those tactics and channels are and what the reach can be are all connected back to the strategy and see if they're supporting getting to that goal. So, once we've got strategy, we've got a set of tactics that we validated, we feel like should be in the plan, then we move into A, and this is the application layer. So, this is looking at all of our assets. Everything from landing pages to creative for ads to email templates and content connected back to, hopefully you've got a solid brand strategy and roadmap, to make sure everything's consistent. Messaging is on point. You have everything that you need to put your message out there into the channels. The biggest asset that often gets overlooked or waited till the end to evaluate is your website overall, too. So, we can have the best campaign, and then we send people to the site, and it's not ready to either track the results or to walk them through some type of funnel or customer journey that you want them to take. But we want to get in and out of this phase. We're not actually doing anything in Photoshop or any design tools here, we're just setting the tone or setting the list of what assets we need to address, and flights of ads or how we're going to test them as well. R is the review stage. I could have called this reporting, but I feel like reporting a short sighted. Review is more holistic, because basic reporting tools out of the box don't understand or know how much you invest dollars wise on your in-house team or agency partners or consultants or software or other things to see a holistic return on investment for marketing. So, getting that configured and understanding your full ROI math, if you haven't done it in the strategy phase, understanding how you'll track it. This is a catch all that will catch you and make you go back and address that. But also, if you've got that set, then this is where you can understand how you're going to report on it and not get six months in and have missing data that you can't go recapture. The T at the end is transformation. So, it's a big, lofty word, but this is how we put the plan into action. This is how we map it out. It's great to have all this on paper or digital paper in essence, but getting it documented in a way that it's not going to be something that two months in we get busy or distracted r something comes up, and where a new product launches, or a new service offering comes out, or something blows up in our industry, and we put that thing on the shelf, and we don't come back to it. And so, this is mapping out all the resources, timeline, tactics, who's going to do what. I started my career as an SEO and over time, it's a good thing, but I needed more and more people without SEO titles to help me be successful as an SEO, from writers to designers web developers in some industries, legal and compliance and being friends with them and any stakeholders who needed to approve things, as well as the brand team and all of that. So, understanding and making sure you don't have roadblocks in those resources. Someone could go on parental leave two months after you craft this perfect plan in a vacuum, and don’t have a way around that. Now you have challenges or excuses when you get to six months or a year and you want to report back on it, and it's like, well, we couldn't do this because of X, Y and Z. No one wants to do that when they're investing. So, that's the five steps. We like to do in a 60 to 90 day sprint, as well, and that's why we have to resist the urge to go start tinkering with our website or designing stuff in it, because we want a documented plan now we can implement for the year and not take six months getting ready to get ready or to skip some steps and then go spend a bunch of money and find out in a really expensive way whether it worked or not.

Yeah, there's so many people in organizations that I see fit into the category that you first alluded to, which is, hey, I was at a conference, and we should go try that, or, I saw a video, and we need to be doing this, and it's very disjointed. So, your S in your START acronym strategy, gosh, starting there just seems really wise, probably not fun for a lot of organizations, kind of like what you alluded to and with your very first answer, but I also really appreciate having that strategy not just be, oh, we got more clicks, or we got more engagements, or there's more people commenting on our Instagram post or whatever, but no, actually linking it back to what business results are we actually looking for? Let's look at those dashboards. And so, I think that's tough. Those are some tough, tough things.

Yeah, there have been a couple of times where my team has gotten some marketing people uncomfortable, where it's like, they can't answer the business outcome numbers, because they're big organization, siloed, maybe disjointed a little bit, or they didn't have that expectation. I'm sure they've been feeling the pressure of like, what is this driving, but they've been at arm's length, or never asked the hard question and we've had to get messy with them. It's not that there's not some tactic or cool strategy or new thing that we haven't thought of out there that we should incorporate, but anytime a new idea comes up, or whether it's an industry disruption to our regularly scheduled plan, or an internal one of, hey, we want to test this audience, or we want to do this offer, what's great about having a plan is it's on paper, it's objective, it's not personal. I don't have to take anything personally if I own the marketing function or I'm the one-person team. It's on paper. It's been agreed to by the stakeholder. So, it's time out, you know, even if it's a five-minute conversation. How does this change any priorities in the plan? How does this fit in? Are we reallocating budget or focus? Do we need to go back and revisit and put this through a micro version of the planning process to evaluate this before we implement it? I joke about it being a CEO drive by. It's like, you know, walk by my office, hey, have you thought about that audience? If you don't say, time out, what does this change and then you report back at the end of the year, again, it sounds like a bunch of excuses. Well, we did this for a couple months, and then we got off the plan because somebody asked us to do that, then we got distracted over here. The goal of it, while I want to have a year planned out, I also want to account for trigger actions or activities like that. That's what I've named those, but also have enough agility built in that at regular intervals, we are revisiting. We're not just gonna blindly work the plan. We gotta optimize and have room built in to adjust on the fly as well but do it in a systematic way.

There's like a program within the parameters, right? Like, yes, you can move and shake, but if you're only moving shaking, then you're not sticking to a plan, but if you're only sticking to a plan with blinders on, and you miss an opportunity because of that, it sounds like you want to do both, but do both intentionally, not just willy nilly, if I'm hearing you properly.

Absolutely.

As we start to dig down a little bit, I guess there's a couple of questions that I want to ask you. The first one would be, is there a case study, like, is there an organization, you don't need to name names and all that type of thing, but hey, this organization came to us with this type of scenario. This is the START situation that we ran them through, and these are the types of results that we were able to help them get. I know you and I didn't talk about that ahead of time, is there anything like that that you might be able to outline for us to just make it more tangible and real for the listeners?

Yeah, probably one of my favorite case studies and it was a precursor to this. So, now we've done this a dozen times for clients, as the start planning process to arrive at a digital marketing success plan. But a really good case study in precursor was a third-party logistics firm who cared about lead generation, you know, B to B. They weren't shipping things around the globe as the low-cost leader, it was more about relationship based and value add and having the all the services together to get it from overseas to final destination. From border clearance to everything. So, they were a large global organization, small marketing team, but had no one who is an owner or champion for the CRM. The sales team wasn't using it. Marketing was looked at as more of a traditional old school create some sales collateral, send out some email newsletters, but they got to a point where they got bought by P firm, and expectations changed, and all of a sudden nobody really understood who owned, analytics and all of this stuff. So, we came in, and I'm not saying we came in as the hero in the story right away, but we came in how to understand what we were taking over and how to integrate things and how to build a strategy. It took some time of earning our way deeper into systems and through legal and compliance as well, and eventually we got to a point where, when we realized nobody owned the CRM, and even though it was a CRM that we didn't know, it was in our best interest and the clients for us to learn it inside and out, get it configured, get everybody on board with using it and be able to report on it. So, a few years in, we were able to get to a point where we could see the full picture and report on it and set annual goals and go through a full planning process beyond that. But we were able to get to a point where we were on an $80,000 year spend or investment in marketing and generated 1.2 million, with that much or more still open to the pipeline on an organization that had a nine- or 10-month sales cycle. So, in cases like that, I'm still surprised with how powerful getting everything aligned and understanding it all the way through and having that buy in, how powerful this can be when we're all going in the same direction, we have the expectations and conviction behind the plan. It was really gratifying to sit with the CEO, who I never interfaced with. The first time I sat down with him, I got pulled into a meeting and was able to show him real numbers, a few years into working with them.

Yeah, that example just reminds me of all the tools that organizations buy and don't use. Like there's so much of that, and I think CRM is usually one of them. I see so many organizations have, whether it's a CRM or other tool or technology that they own, and they may just be using this little component over there, or people are using it differently and there's so many resources that organizations invest in and then don't end up using to their full capacity. And, yeah, that example is a great one. Very cool. So, if you're listening to this right now, and you're an organization that has technologies or a CRM or a program or a technique that you bought, and you're not using, boy, have this be a wakeup call. And whether it's a call to Corey or not, or just another review of things, boy, I would encourage that. What a great case study. Ai, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you this, but where does AI fit in in everything that we've talked about so far, from a digital marketing standpoint?

Yeah, so, what we know is that that we have a target audience out there, they do things online, and we want them to connect with us, right?

Yep.

What is happening is interesting. The trend started before COVID even, long before AI of Google sending less traffic through than ever to websites, like the zero click searches and Google answering questions directly in search, similar to what you see on LinkedIn and other places where it's good for brand awareness, good for thought leadership and at the right time, somebody may engage on LinkedIn, and there are a lot of different ways to build your strategy and have it mapped out for those different channels, but it's really disrupting search engine optimization, among a million other things and content creation and everything else. In SEO specifically, I look at it as a big opportunity, because more diversified sources and less dependence on Google will be a good thing, but it puts more on us as marketers and brands to make sure that we're being smart and going for quality and not quantity and not trying to just be everything to everyone. So, understanding that if we have a segment of our audience who is searching and researching in ChatGPT that we understand how to optimize and be listed there, versus Google, versus Bing, versus the number of other channels as well. So, it's going to get harder for a period, but disruption is the name of the game in digital marketing anyway.

Sure, sure.

And so embracing that and understanding that the thing that doesn't change is investing in quality content and understanding your audience. And if you've just been leaning on some personas and your brand, probably time to get deeper than that. I just actually wrote yesterday for Search Engine Journal about not just knowing who your target audience is but knowing where they are.

Yeah.

And that seems basic. It is. It might be one thing to say, well, they're on LinkedIn, they're on whatever, but really knowing who and where they are in in a granular way and what they do. So, it might require some research, might require a new look through the lens, might require some surveys, but understanding where they are today and to continue that process as things are pretty rapidly evolving will be a good investment on that side of it. That will save you on the back end from doing things in an outdated way or throwing it out into a vacuum that's not necessarily going to bring them back to you.

Yeah, it's exactly right. Where your target audience hung out before, may be different moving forward and always taking another look at that. So, yeah, really, that's insightful. Corey, is there anything that that I haven't asked you on this topic of digital marketing, that either you would hope that I would ask or that you would want to throw out there before we wrap up today?

I would have jumped into AI naturally as a tech nerd, but I think that hits on it pretty well without getting into the weeds and without pulling out a crystal ball in here and speculating.

Sure.

And I'm pretty far away from that. I am pretty grounded in the what works today, with an eye out for and testing what works tomorrow. So, I think that would be the way I would button up that topic. I will say this. If you are one of those people who is who is wired to go and you're spending a lot of time exploring AI or other new technologies, you probably need to put some parameters around that and make sure you're not taking your eye off of what works today.

Yes.

But if you're on the other end of it, and you get to the end of the day and you keep thinking, I need it check that out, I need to test that. I need to experiment with that, I need to read up on that, but you don't have enough time in the day, you need to build in some intentional time for testing and room to experiment as well. So, I know people are wired both ways, where it's like, you know, defining that balance is critical, because I don't want you to get left behind, or I don't want you to get so distracted, or be so distracted that you're out there trying to find that 1% of market share that may be in that new technology that's here today and gone tomorrow, and you took your focus off of what works today, too. So, it's a tricky balance, but having scheduled an intentional time to test and experiment and research, or even just sign up for webinars and learn, start somewhere if you haven't gotten on the on board yet.

Yes. Sage insights, Corey. I see too many people, whether it's themselves in their own career or heads of organizations, man, they're looking at the horizon so much and, in the future, so much that they're missing what's available to them right now, or, like you say, what's working right now. And boy, concentrate on the task at hand with an eye, like you said, with an eye to the future. So, yeah, I love the way that you said that. Thank you for that. I have a feeling people are going to want to reach out to you. How do they find your book that you wrote? How do they how do people find you? Where are you active?

Yeah. So, the book is a long title, Digital Marketing Success Plan, so I've shortened that to the dmsp.com. You can find the framework there, the website based on that and it'll link you over to Amazon, or you can just go directly there to find it. You can reach out to me there if you have any questions, or I'll be happy to send you a free copy if you just send me a note through the contact form on that site and just make mention that you saw this conversation with Jason. I'll be happy to talk with you, free consult, no sales pitch attached, or if you come to me over through my agency website, which is Voltage.digital.

Perfect. Corey, thank you so much for your expertise. This is well needed. I can speak on behalf of our audience that we're grateful for you and your expertise and what you do. We need people like you. So, thank you for doing what you're doing. Thank you for your time and expertise today. And
yeah, The Digital Marketing Success Plan, DMSP, for short. And I do think people will reach out to you. Corey, thank you so much, my man.

Thank you. Appreciate it.


Well, wow, that was so good. Corey Morris really spat out some insights when it comes to digital marketing. His digital marketing success plan with his acronym START, which I loved: strategy, tactics, application, review and finally, transformation for your business. Tying it all back to results, which I really appreciated. He is not afraid to do a deeper dive because he is looking to get results for your organization, which I just appreciate. Having a plan that's written down and defined, that was a great insight. And then the last thing that we ended on is something that I wrote down. Gosh, do not skip what is working today for you, but rather work what works today with an eye on what might work for the future. So, thank you so much, Corey for those insights. But like we say at the end of every episode of The Insight Interviews, it doesn't much matter what me as the host what my insights were, but what really matters is, what insights did you have?

                                                                                                             ---

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