Want to get ahead of the curve on your ecommerce digital growth goals? VOLTAGE will be your digital growth partner through the highs and lows of the race to win leads. How do we do it? By using the VOLTAGE Digital Growth Framework: We take your business goals and apply our four step process until you get the results you’ve been searching for.
Remember when Marty McFly is thrown back into the ’50s when an experiment by his eccentric scientist friend Doc Brown goes awry? Traveling through time in a modified DeLorean car, Marty encounters young versions of his parents and must make sure that they fall in love or he’ll cease to exist. Even more dauntingly, Marty has to return to his own time and save the life of Doc Brown. He does all of this through the use of the electrifying flux capacitor.
As your digital growth partner, VOLTAGE uses our own electrifying special sauce, our high octane fuel, or if you prefer, our unique framework, to learn, plan, create and optimize your digital marketing assets, whether that’s a website, app, performance ads or custom technologies. This digital growth framework is what helps us, to help you, drive your brand back to the future.
During our 4-step framework we take your business goals and then search and discover the areas of your digital assets that will experience the most impact if adjusted. We then build a plan, execute on that plan, test it and use the results to determine what else should be done. Diving deeper into your business is what keeps us on track with your business wants and needs. With that slapdash summary, it’s time to peek under the hood now and explore the steps of the cycle in more detail.
At VOLTAGE, the Learn Phase is an assessment of your digital growth opportunity.
We like to start with an audit of your existing touchpoints – from the initial ad view to the form submission to the referral. In this phase, we help to identify your real opportunities. Whether that’s conducting interviews with your team and employees, auditing your site performance, or diving deep in discovery on your customer journey and personas, we get to know your urgent priorities as our client.
The audit can also be called the “discovery session.” Depending on your situation, this might be a technical discovery, brand discovery, or a marketing discovery.
1) Technical Discovery Session
It’s common for brands to switch technical partners, but when that happens there can be a lot lost in translation. We’ll go behind the curtain and document ways to streamline and update your ecosystem so there are no surprises when it’s go time.
2) Brand Discovery Session
Get ready to go deep. Our strategists will lead you through a workshop that gets to the heart of where you’ve been and where you’re headed. When you need to find a new angle, get re-energized, and charge your brand forward, this session yields high-value insights and recommendations.
3) Marketing Discovery Session
We’ll map out your marketing funnel, customer journey, and audience demographics so you get a clear picture of the path toward winning hearts and minds. With an objective and expert lens, we will dive deep into your marketing channels with you, to identify brand and technical growth opportunities.
These priorities and new opportunities are uncovered by reviewing your digital assets (ie. website, apps, etc.) in depth. We are then able to navigate the course to make the biggest impacts with the simplest adjustments. This may mean something as big as lead capture and site speed or something as small and significant as the discovery of broken links.
There’s something to be said for having outside eyes on your brand. Brand managers who come to us have often been so hyper-focused on their brand that they can’t see it clearly anymore, and this is holding them back. We’re able to act as a trusted advisor to help them look at their brand through new and/or realistic eyes. While they’ve subjectively been responsible for a single brand, we’ve been through this countless times with many brands and are trained to find opportunities with an objective lens that usually only an outsider can provide.
By learning and assessing the situation, we can establish what’s wrong. Whatever the issue(s) may be, we will discover it and then move forward to the next phase.
In the Planning Phase, we develop a custom digital growth plan. A winning brand starts with strategy and is obsessively focused on the customer. Do it right and the right customers will vibe with you.
The planning or strategy stage is comparable to tuning a racing engine. Cars come off of the lot and are capable of driving certain speeds but people want to optimize them and so they tune the cars and install fancy, new after-market parts. If you’re optimizing for speed, wouldn’t you want a Porsche or a finely tuned race car versus an off-the-shelf KIA?
What we do to your website is very similar to the car enhancement process. If your website is important to converting your leads and plays a key role for your business (isn’t that everyone?), then you want the best, optimized parts for increasing speed and conversions. That’s where VOLTAGE comes in with the digital growth plan.
The digital growth plan is based on your budget, key metrics, goals, or priorities. If you want to sell more, then we’ll prioritize work on the parts that drive sales. If you are seeking better brand loyalty then we will work to understand and implement a customer journey that leads to repeat purchase and referrals. If you are constrained by an entrepreneur’s budget, we will create a plan to implement improvements more slowly, in a phased approach, while ensuring that growth occurs at a steady and strong pace. We deliver by composing growth plans, metrics of success, roadmaps, then reporting our plan, followed by weekly check-ins and budget updates.
As a strategic agency, the planning chapter is vital to the whole process and our experienced project managers will map out a procedure with the capacity to charge your brand with the results you’re looking for.
During the Create Phase, we conduct an educated and controlled but highly creative experiment.
Armed with research insights and a solid strategy, we begin developing the right tools with the right message and visuals for the right moments. Our teams have worked with big brands from Reebok to Chipotle and from Fjallraven to [solidcore] and many more, crafting digital experiences from custom, premium ecommerce websites to creative and engaging brand videos. Our off-the-charts time-traveling creativity is the secret ingredient in our special sauce. Together with our premium engineering, we can launch your car to higher heights.
To craft something special for your unique needs, we take the learnings from the Learn Phase, within the structure outlined by the Plan Phase and put them into action. We execute the plan, applying the adjustments that will make the biggest difference in your brand’s digital world.
This phase can include (but is not limited to) the creation of new pages, new campaigns and other digital marketing assets that will attract people. This could include cleaning up your current site or re-coding new user experience (UX) features from scratch. It could include new UX designs, creative campaigns or messages that hook. Depending on your customer journey, it could include all of the above!
With assets in hand we “push play,” putting everything that we’ve created together to work for you. And then we move on to optimizing all of your digital assets.
In the Optimize Phase, we test our work and assess the results.
This is where we connect all the dots, launch your figurative car off the starting block, test the performance and watch your brand story come to life through strategic marketing channels. The key to this phase is the optimization and testing of your digital assets.
Optimization is the process of studying your digital space to maximize the results, and testing the digital solutions that we’ve partnered on, so that we can cross the finish line to your desired marketing outcomes. In other words, we measure the results of your new assets and then assess how your digital channels are now performing. The process of optimization ensures that we’re not spinning in circles – and you’re not blowing your budget – without reaching our goals.
This phase can include the testing, collection and analysis of marketing data through A/B testing, the refinement of your marketing process and the identification of automation opportunities. Depending on the results, there may be some tweaking to do. In the quest for results, we are testing digital performance theories and then determining whether our solutions need fine-tuning before they’re off to the races.
The beauty of growth is that it’s never finished. Technologies and design trends are ever-changing, and there’s always more to learn about your audience and what they want from your brand. We don’t just focus on what’s not capturing results. We’re also identifying what’s working and successful, then we continue to do more of it.
As partners, we have an opportunity to take our new knowledge and go back to learn more, before planning, creating and optimizing again, making it a cycle of growth that stays current and adaptable to market trends and changes. We circle our way around the track, back to the learning stage, to ask ourselves, “what next?”
Just like Marty McFly uses the flux capacitor to go back to his own time, we use this framework to get your brand caught up to where it needs to be. With our formula to learn, plan, create, and optimize, we launch your goals into reality and travel through time with you. This digital process guides us on the course to success and we are continuously discovering more along the way. To keep the momentum, whatever we gain from the optimization phase will be applied to the learning phase, beginning the cyclical growth process again.
1) Learn: We conduct an audit of your digital assets to identify the opportunities for the biggest growth impact.
2) Plan: We develop a strategic digital growth plan based on your budget, key metrics, goals, or priorities.
3) Create: We get creative, guided by strategy and generate the brand assets that drive growth and loyalty.
4) Optimize: We test digital performance, determine if adjustments are needed and optimize the assets.
As a brand/marketing manager/entrepreneur, you’re aware that you never get to sit back for more than 2 seconds at a time! Since there are always untapped opportunities, we’d love to help you find yours. Have you found that your brand needs a digital growth boost?
[We’re armed with the right tools! Let us help → ]
The images for this post were generated using the new AI tool DALL·E and then perfected to the tiniest detail by our illustrator and designer Zach.
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