Corey Morris-- How to START a Successful Digital Marketing Plan

Corey Morris, CEO of Voltage and author of The Digital Marketing Success Plan, joins The Briefcase to share the power of START, a five-step framework designed to help marketers and businesses cut through the noise and create actionable, enduring plans. Morris provides a compelling argument for structured agility in digital marketing, from avoiding over-complication to building strategies that outlast employee turnover to reminding listeners that agility can quickly become chaos without a clear plan.

You'll learn:

– The START Framework – A five-step, 90-day process for building actionable digital marketing plans.
– Structured Agility – Balancing long-term strategy with short-term adaptability.
– Sustainable Planning – Creating marketing plans that endure team changes and distractions.

Discover more at sutherlandweston.com/briefcase/

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) This process is disciplined and structured, but it's
enough.
Choose your own adventure that you're going to
land on your version of a plan.
This is The Briefcase from Sutherland Weston Marketing
Communications.
Quick conversations from everyday observations delivering practical marketing
ideas you can carry with you.

(00:20):
I'm Corey Morris, CEO of Voltage.
And you are the author of a book
called The Digital Marketing Success Plan.
And I want to start with start because
it's an acronym that could really save businesses
a whole lot of heartache.
Corey, what are you writing about?
Yeah, that's ultimately the goal.
The book really packages up the five-step

(00:41):
process that I and my team really had
overcomplicated for a number of years.
Like so many marketing agencies and service-based
companies, we have had a process to set
goals and try to make the initial phase
of figuring out how you make money and
what you're doing online to do so, overcomplicated
or overbranded or looking like a Trojan horse

(01:05):
for just any other process packaged up a
different way.
In our case, we really just overcomplicated it
and iterated on it every time.
So we couldn't explain what we were doing,
but we could tell you, you really needed
to do it.
And we had some case studies backing that
up.
So for us, it was really about getting
it down to a five-step process that
you could get in and out of in

(01:26):
90 days that would save a lot of
the heartaches and a lot of the challenges
that prospects and clients had come to us
when I realized it was too late, where
they had things out of order, tactics ahead
of strategy, spent a lot of money in
a test and learn mode where they learned
they could spend a lot of money really
fast, but didn't really get where they wanted
to get in terms of optimizing.

(01:48):
One of the things within Start, you talk
of how turnover can really kill the momentum
of a company.
Yeah.
So having a documented, accountable and actionable plan
is important.
And so documented isn't just so you can
hold people accountable, but we can look at
attrition and how often since the pandemic people

(02:09):
have moved jobs for, in many cases, great
reasons, but you want to have a plan
that outlives or outlasts the person's tenure who
was in that seat, especially if you're investing,
whether it's in the C suite or all
the way down to the person nerding out
in the weeds of whatever their craft or
discipline is in digital marketing.
If they go out the door, you don't
want to have to start over and start

(02:29):
from scratch or have that plan be something
that's in their head and that leaves.
You also talk about we're at point A,
we want to be at point B, but
there are benchmarks that you achieve.
And if you don't stop and take a
moment and make sure you're headed in the
right direction, you could be headed South pretty
fast.
Yeah, there's a nice blend of planned activities

(02:49):
versus agile concepts in any solid plan.
We're not writing a plan for the year
and we're just going to blindly run that
plan and hope it works out.
But at the same time, people will often
not plan because they're like, well, it's digital,
it's optimization.
We're going to take such an agile approach
to it that we chase every shiny object
that comes.
Sometimes those are external things like the newest

(03:11):
development in AI, the newest disruption in what
Google is doing or Facebook or whomever.
It could be a competitor.
But a lot of those are internal as
well.
If we're wearing multiple hats in a marketing
team or in our business or we have
what I call the CEO drive by where
it's like, hey, have we thought about this
audience?
Have we thought about that opportunity?

(03:32):
Or we're going to this new trade show
or we're thinking about launching this new product
or service.
Do we take a time out, even if
it's a five minute one, and say, how
does this restack the priorities, budget allocations and
focus of what we're already targeting versus us
chasing that next shiny object?
And we do that every month.
And then at the end of the year,
when we're called to report against the plan

(03:53):
and the investment, it just sounds like a
bunch of excuses.
We could have done all really good things,
but we didn't stick to any and see
them through far enough.
But we didn't just blindly run a plan
and hoped it worked out when we could,
of course, correct it along the way.
And if you don't stick with start, start
can become stall.
Absolutely.
I get asked at times about what is

(04:15):
this in deliverable look like?
And it's almost like this process is disciplined
and structured, but it's enough.
Choose your own adventure that you're going to
land on your version of a plan.
Your plan needs to be something that you
can summarize an executive summary down to a
paragraph and not a paragraph of 10 sentences
run on sentences.
But you need to be able to articulate
and stay on the same page and have

(04:37):
that be the lens that you look through
for decisions that you make.
And as you get tempted or distracted by
other shiny objects and things you can do,
going back to that, you can read more
about the digital marketing success plan, including the
start planning process at the DMSP dot com,
or you can see what we're up to
at Voltage at Voltage dot digital.

(04:58):
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Sutherland Westin Marketing Communications.
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