The digital marketing space is constantly evolving. As a result, marketers must remain vigilant to changes in the industry and how their spend is being allocated. There is always a new tactic or strategy that marketers can take advantage of. This makes staying on top of best practices and industry trends more important than ever when it comes to budgeting and planning out your marketing spend.
We work with many clients who are not only smart, successful people but also those who are very detail-oriented. They want to understand why we do things a certain way and what the data is telling us about their business — which is great! It’s amazing to work with such brilliant people every day, especially ones who care so much about their business and look for ways to improve it in every area possible.
In this blog post, we will dive deeper into our SOS (Situation, Objective, Strategy) model that helps businesses optimize their marketing spend.
Why Is Digital Marketing Spend Optimization Important?
There are so many different ways to spend money on digital marketing, but how do you know if you’re getting value for your money? The last thing you want for your business is to blow through money without getting anything in return.
More importantly, optimizing your digital marketing spend is the best way to ensure your online business is offering your customers the best possible experience they can get. Here are a few reasons why it’s important to optimize your digital marketing spend:
Create a Personalized Experience: Optimizing your digital marketing spend means spending your budget on the most effective digital marketing strategies. It means using the right channels, with the right message, and targeting the right target audience. This requires a high level of personalization depending on factors such as consumer demographics and the stage of the sales funnel they are at.
Edge Out the Competition: According to Insider Intelligence, eCommerce sales will account for 20.3% of global retail sales by the end of the year. The competition is only bound to get stiffer. To be able to rise above your competition and thrive, you need to make the best out of your digital marketing budget no matter how limited it is. It’s important to know when to go for PPC advertising and when social media marketing is the best option.
See Fast ROI: Knowing where, when, and how to spend your budget will not only get you maximum return on investment but also get it fast. You’ll be able to execute your campaigns effectively and efficiently.
The SOS model allows you to identify digital marketing best practices so you can get the most out of your budget. It also helps you to keep track of trends and discover new best practices as they emerge in the industry.
What is the SOS Model?
The SOS model is a strategic marketing model developed by Salt Marketing to help clients optimize their digital marketing spend. It is an acronym for Situation, Objective, and Strategy:
1. Situation
This refers to the current state of the business and marketing departments. It includes key factors like the size of the business and its marketing budget. It also includes a summary of the business’s digital marketing spend and efforts, as well as its core digital marketing KPIs. Basically, where are you now?
We will perform customer analysis, digital marketing trends analysis, your strengths and weaknesses, and past and present performance in order to generate insightful reports that can guide you on the next course of action. Some of the checks we perform during situational analysis include:
Identifying problems with your website and receive a comprehensive list of solutions
Checking for broken pages, links, and problems with basic HTML tags
Detecting complex issues related to international SEO, crawlability, and schema optimization
Evaluating your competitors’ data such as keywords, backlinks, ad campaigns, and top-performing content so you can examine their strengths and shortcomings (360° competitor research)
2. Objective
Where do you want to go? What are you looking to achieve? At this point, we look at your digital marketing goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). The most common digital marketing goals are:
Growing your social media presence
Enhancing your brand visibility
Increasing your lead generation and conversion rates
Improving your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs)
Once we’ve determined your goals, we’ll also develop measurable KPIs to help us know if we are on the right track and tweak the strategy as needed.
3. Strategy
When we have identified your current situation and where you’re looking to reach, we can develop a digital marketing strategy to help you get there. Our strategies are tailored to your unique business needs and goals. This is also the part where we look at the industry best practices you can take advantage of to achieve your marketing goals.
Some of the actionable strategies we use for our clients include:
Keyword Research: We use keyword research tools to find new keywords you can target based on competition level, keyword difficulty, monthly volume, related phrases, and user intent among others.
The conceptualisation of Content Ideas: Use the Topic Research tool to discover hundreds of new subjects. Focus on real-world questions, topical headlines, and subtopics.
Rank Tracking with a Sharp Focus: Track daily keyword rankings by zip code, device, and location in one dashboard. Discover your competition and new SERP Features.
A Full Link Building Process: Run a Backlink Gap research to see who links to other speciality sites but not yours. We also view your competitor’s backlink statistics using Backlink Analytics reports and set up a link outreach campaign in Link Building.
The primary focus of our digital marketing strategies is how to help you get where you want to be!
How Does Our SOS Model Help?
The SOS model allows us to better understand your business and how we can help you achieve your digital marketing goals. It allows us to get to know you better and tailor our strategy to fit your unique situation.
The model helps us break down the digital marketing process and see how different efforts can be applied to achieve your objectives. When we apply the SOS model, we aren’t just recommending digital marketing tactics and strategies. We’re also looking at why these tactics are applicable and what data shows is working best for your business. Furthermore, we are looking at data that shows what might not be working and why. This gives us a more comprehensive understanding of your business and a better grasp of how we can help.
The SOS model ensures we’re recommending the most optimal strategy possible. It helps us make sure we aren’t just recommending what’s hot at the moment but what is actually best for your business. It keeps us accountable for what insightful data shows is working best for your business.
Using The SOS Model In Real Life: An Example
Let’s say you own a fitness app and want to increase app downloads by 10%. You would use the SOS model to break down the situation, objectives, and strategy. Here’s how the breakdown would look:
The Situation: Your business has grown to 10,000 monthly app downloads. You’re looking to increase that number to 15,000. Your marketing budget is €20,000. Your KPIs are app downloads, customer acquisition, and customer retention.
The Objective: Increase monthly app downloads by 10% so you can scale your business and reach more customers.
The Strategy: We recommend you take advantage of Facebook and Gmail retargeting ads. We also recommend investing in Facebook and Instagram ads to drive app downloads and reach new customers.
These are all best practices based on data and what works best for your business.
Maximize Your Digital Marketing ROI with Salt Marketing’s SOS Model
It is important that we understand which digital marketing efforts are working best and why so we can continue to optimize our clients’ digital marketing efforts. Keeping track of your digital marketing efforts is crucial in order to maximize the ROI from your digital marketing efforts. Making sure that you understand the situation you’re in, the objectives you’re trying to achieve, and the strategies you’re taking advantage of is critical for success.
The SOS model is a helpful model that has proven effective for our clients, and we intend to refine it for better results over time. As you apply the SOS model across your business, you’ll start to see trends in what works best for your business and what doesn’t. At Salt Marketing, we use a digital marketing scorecard to track our clients’ digital marketing efforts. Contact us to discuss how we can optimize your digital marketing spend.
