The 5-Step Digital Marketing Success Plan with Corey Morris

[00:00:00] What does it take to build a truly effective digital marketing strategy? Well, if you've read Digital Threads, you have my perspective on how to do that. But my guest today is the author of The Digital Marketing Success Plan. And he's here to share his proven framework he uses to drive real business results. From SEO and AI to content strategy and ROI measurement, we're covering it all. Everything you need to know to build a digital marketing plan that actually works.

[00:00:29] So make sure you stay tuned to this next episode of The Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:01:01] You've got Neal on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey friends, this is your digital marketing coach, Neal Schaffer. And welcome to my podcast.

[00:01:29] This is episode number 409. Yes, over 400 episodes over the last 12 years. So if you're still new here, make sure you subscribe and listen to all the goldmine nuggets that I have in all of the past episodes and experts that I've interviewed like today's expert. So as you might know, I love featuring book authors because writing a book forces you to codify your expertise and truly understand what works. So today, I'm excited to introduce Corey Morris.

[00:01:58] He is the CEO of an agency called Voltage and author of the Digital Marketing Success Plan, which you can find on Amazon by doing a search for those words. Corey has spent nearly 20 years leading digital strategies that drive real results. And he's here to share his step-by-step framework for creating a winning digital marketing plan. We're going to dive into the evolution of SEO, the impact of AI, and the common mistakes businesses make when building their marketing strategy.

[00:02:26] So whether you're looking to refine your approach or maybe hit reset and start again from scratch, Corey's insights will help you create a plan that actually moves the needle. So without further ado, here's my interview with Corey Morris. You're listening to Your Digital Marketing Coach. This is Neil Schafer. Hey, everybody. This is Neil Schafer, and welcome to another live stream edition of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

[00:02:55] I always love to have authors of actual books on this podcast because if you've written a book, you've codified your knowledge, your experience, and you're giving it away for everyone to learn from. And today, we are going to be learning from the author of this book, Digital Marketing Success Plan, Mr. Corey Morris out of Kansas City, Missouri. Corey is an agency CEO. In fact, he is the owner, and I'll read about the author from the book. He is the owner and president and CEO of Voltage, a digital marketing design and web development company.

[00:03:24] He spent nearly two decades working in strategic and leadership roles, focusing on growing national and local client brands with award-winning ROI-generating digital strategies. His industry leadership, client success, community-focused work made him the recipient of the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association 2019 Marketer of the Year Award. He is a unique story of an agency employee who actually became owner of the agency.

[00:03:51] And I know that a lot of my listeners actually work for agencies, and maybe you've thought about doing that as well. So I think we have a lot to learn today. So without further ado, here is Corey Morris. Corey, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to dig in, but with all of my guests, I like to start with, how did you get started in digital marketing to begin with? Because I think the way that we get into it really shapes our perspective on the industry and sort of our path. So I'll let you take it away from here.

[00:04:18] Yeah, so I'll try not to make this the entire episode about my journey, but this is my 20th year of my career, 2025. Also, it's the 20th anniversary of my agency, which we can talk about if you'd like. But I started my career, I had a business administration degree with a marketing emphasis from a liberal arts university. That was the most specific I could get. I was not a creative.

[00:04:42] I was not a web developer or anything else, but kind of fell into a role in a spinoff of a traditional agency that was focused on digital. And so I learned that was before the era of open source web. A lot of things were hard coded and or custom CMS. So I fell into a project management role, learned some HTML through that, learned some very basic Photoshop skills as I was trying to be a buffer between developers and designers and do things myself.

[00:05:09] If somebody wanted a sentence changed, that's a point where I challenged myself. And I actually coded or did HTML and CSS for a full website. And then I was looking for what was next. And SEO was something that started interesting me. And thankfully, the agency I was at that time gave me a chance to learn it. They invested in me, sent me out to Southern California for some industry leading training and certification.

[00:05:34] And fast forward, I leveraged my career as an SEO to double down into more broad digital marketing and landed at Voltage in 2013. We were shifting our focus to digital. And fast forward, I went through a succession plan and now it's my shop. Amazing. So you began your journey. I also went to liberal arts college. And yeah, you're not going to get marketing classes there, obviously.

[00:06:00] But you began with SEO and you mentioned just to date this, not to date yourself because you already mentioned a 20-year career. But you mentioned getting into Voltage in 2013. When did you start your foray into SEO? Do you remember? Was it approximately 2008, 2009 when social media was emerging? Yeah. So it was just ahead of the emergence of social media. I was probably seven or eight.

[00:06:24] And what was great is I just settled into SEO, working with a counterpart who's running paid search for that agency. We had an email marketing platform as well in-house. And so we had some integrated strategies we were working on developing for clients. And I had some of my own stable of SEO clients. And I was doing everything from the strategy to the implementation to even the account management, working with them directly. And social media emerged out of nowhere.

[00:06:53] And I was able to track everything through Google Analytics and all the way to conversion. And then all of a sudden, we were hiring in social media roles. And I'm like, wait a minute. We can't even track that to a conversion. And all of a sudden, a lot of companies and agencies were investing in content for social. And I'm like, wait a minute. They're being held to a lower standard than what I'm held to. I'm getting scrutinized for the cost per conversion and all of these things.

[00:07:20] Well, they're just doing it because you're supposed to do it. Yeah. Those were interesting times indeed. I'm curious. And because you've been around in the SEO world since 2007-8, it seems that every few years we have this big algorithmic change. I think with the emergence of Gen AI, we can talk about this. But I'm assuming this is one of the biggest changes. Would you say, if you were to look back at your 17 years of doing SEO, what would you say are the three most impactful changes that have happened in the SEO landscape?

[00:07:50] And I think I know the answers, but I'm curious as to your perspective. Yeah. Probably one of the early ones. Well, early on, some of the animal-named algorithm. The cute ones. Cute animals. Yeah. Yeah. Factors. Yeah. Penguin and Panda, which was originally called Farmer and Hummingbird. All of those early on, I'll just group those into one category. And that was an era of disruptive change.

[00:08:16] I didn't feel that with my clients because I always had a very safe, middle-of-the-sandbox, wide-ranging SEO strategy and didn't put all of my eggs in the basket of content farms or just links or whatever. I didn't get too risky because I was paid to mitigate risk for clients while moving them forward.

[00:08:39] Another one around that same time, too, when we talk about attribution and things was when Google Analytics took away keyword data and being able to track things in keywords. Now, eventually, they restored it with different methodologies, naturally, for tracking it over in Google Webmaster Tools at the time, now Google Search Console. But for a period of time, that was a sketchy area where it was questioned yet again, is SEO dead? Another one was the emergence of voice search.

[00:09:07] That was supposed to kill SEO as we knew it as well. And I was on the record for about a year. In fact, I was in the room at one of the conferences I spoke at and sat in on a session and probably made a colleague who I'm still friendly with frustrated with me at the time because I sat in the back and I asked her in Q&A.

[00:09:28] And she worked at Bing and I said, you know, hey, when are we going to get some of the search data in Bing Webmaster Tools of what people are searching for through voice since we get it through web or mobile? And there was no plan for that. And so that was a reality for me, too, to set in of, hey, if this world gets taken over by voice assistants and it changes everything, is that going to kill SEO?

[00:09:52] And then, yes, now the era we're in where AI has disrupted everything and we can't escape it for two seconds and any content online about marketing. Thank you so much. I love the perspective because, as you know, the Google helpful content update seemed to be one of these updates where even if you were playing according to the rules, mitigating the risks, creating what you thought were helpful content, there were a lot of sites that still got hit in a way that my site included.

[00:10:21] I'm curious as to why you didn't include that. Or would you say that would be like a number four if you had to do a top four? That would. I think we didn't have any client sites, and I hesitate to say that and put that out in the universe that got hit for it. We did have a couple that we had to navigate in some of the your money, your life types of things, like one that was selling wedding gifts, unique gifts for wedding themed gifts.

[00:10:50] And got lumped into with, you know, getting married being a big life decision category. And we had to navigate around that a little bit. But yeah, we've been fortunate to be diversified enough and or to not necessarily get into some of those algorithmic things, especially the ones that Google has stated have unfortunately no documented or known way to recover from. Yeah, indeed.

[00:11:18] And I guess with every algorithmic change, I think you'd agree there. They don't give you a checklist of how to recover. They just remind you of what your content should be. And it's very broad. But nevertheless, if you follow those guidelines, then you shouldn't theoretically have these issues. But anyway, I don't want to get too stuck on the SEO. So I want to move on because obviously your book, at some point you decided to write this book, The Digital Marketing Success Plan.

[00:11:42] And as we know, for those that have read my own digital threads, that search is this integral part of digital marketing, obviously, that, you know, whether you call it one third, one fourth, one half. But there's other components as well. So tell me what prompted you? What inspired you? Because there's thousands of agency owners and very few have gone as far as writing a book. So I'm curious as to what inspired you, what prompted you to write this book, and then we'll get into some of the teachings of the book. Yeah. So first off, I want to give credit where it's due.

[00:12:09] So for any agency owner, and even more broadly, if you're in any type of business and you're considering what your authority position is or can't answer the question about what it is or what your niche is, or you're considering or thinking in the back of your mind like I did for many years.

[00:12:26] I need to niche down, I need to be able to, you know, I've got too many focuses or too many messages and I can't really claim, I can't keep up with trying to claim expertise in all of them at the same time or it gets watered down.

[00:12:40] So I read the book, Sell With Authority by Drew McClellan and Stephen Wessner, and actually attended a workshop for some extra accountability that they put on that works through narrowing down your niche, understanding your niche, as well as then figuring out what kind of cornerstone content you want. So whether that you can use to leverage and position that and at least share your message with the world.

[00:13:04] And so whether that's writing a book or hosting a podcast or having a keynote speech or doing industry specific research, whatever it is, is building that authority position and sharing it with the world openly and being helpful first and not just making it look like a Trojan horse for your agency. That's just another way that you put some branding on the same product or commodity deliverable that everybody else is doing. So for me, I landed on writing a book because I love to write.

[00:13:32] I write for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal and I've written for being a contributor for Forbes. And so I love to write and nerd out. I love to speak on stages, but I felt like the book is something I hadn't done.

[00:13:45] And at the same time, I thought about in any new business conversations I'm in, I could aggregate to three to five to seven different categories of what all the pain points are for prospects or even my existing clients of what they've been through. And I thought transparency is typically refreshing to them. So what if I just gave away the entire process? Who cares if competitors see it?

[00:14:11] In fact, it will add maybe some accountability as much for my team as any others on leveling up how we talk about this and how we don't rush into something. And then even with all the KPIs going in the right direction, get fired anyway, because we didn't connect enough of the business dots or help our clients get there. Yeah. Congratulations for taking that step in writing a book and sharing. And I have the same message to everybody listening to this podcast, actually.

[00:14:39] And especially if you are a business owner, you know, a CEO and executive, you have a lot to share. And it is counterintuitive, isn't it? That we think we want to sort of hold back our best stuff. And I have always found, and it has always been the advice that you want to give away everything you have. I mean, Corey, I wrote about this in my newsletter today, but I was on a pre-sales call and it was a B2B company that was struggling with LinkedIn. And I gave them, you know, after a 30-minute call, five really targeted points of advice that they should leverage, whether they hire me or not.

[00:15:07] But like everything else, someone's going to read this book and they're going to go, oh my gosh, there's so much to do. They're not going to be able to do it all themselves. So actually by sharing more of that knowledge, it increases the possibility that there's this gap between what the company, the reader can do and what they should do. And then they reach out to you. So I'm assuming you've seen positive ROI from having the book out there. I have.

[00:15:28] I've had some opportunities to just openly share, I think, in a different way than even for me in the past and to try to make the content and the process approachable. There's not a magic bullet or magical tactic in here. The one thing that, you know, is like the aha that you're going to run with.

[00:15:47] And in fact, that's actually one of the big points in the book is that this is a framework and a process to go through to get to your own individualized plan and not just be reliant on or floating around of, hey, we heard this expert talk about this thing. Or we came back from this trade show and that speaker talked about that one magic thing that we got to do tomorrow that's going to move the needle for us in ROI.

[00:16:10] And so, yeah, a lot of other agencies, a lot of companies and big brands have their own planning process or their own planning framework. And we had our own before we organized it and it was messy and it was hard to explain. And probably 80 percent of it is included in everybody else's. But we got to I'm like, I'm fine. If there's a nugget or a piece of this that resonates, that helps you add this into your process. Great.

[00:16:37] But, yeah, in several cases, we've had opportunities for helping the done for you or with you version come in our doors and say, that's great. I've read it or I've heard you talk about it. I don't have the energy or bandwidth or ability to or we need an outside voice to help walk us through this versus trying to self implement. Exactly. And I think, my friend, you also have what we call the curse of wisdom that we think that everybody knows this. It's basic. Everyone's doing it.

[00:17:07] But actually, once you get it out there, you realize that a lot of people aren't doing it. They didn't know that. So, you know, congratulations. I want to get into a little bit more into the book into you talk about this process, this framework. So let's start with that. What is, you know, for a digital marketing success plan, I guess the framework, you know, you really begin with a plan, a strategy. And I've always been passionate about this as well, that so many companies just jump into the tactics without strategy. So I'm assuming that that was the first thing you wanted to address, correct? Absolutely.

[00:17:36] That's one of the big stories in there is a prospect who became a client who I talked about. They were the classic tactics ahead of strategy or without it. I've written, I mentioned the publications I write for. I've written numerous times on what I probably didn't coin the phrase, but what I call checklist SEO. And none of the things in best practices checklist are bad things or wrong things.

[00:18:04] And they probably all, many if not all, should be in your strategy and your plan and your tactics. But doing a checklist or doing the best practices without them being linked to a strategy is dangerous because then it's just activity. It's like, if you can't question why do I need to write four blog posts a month and post five times a week on social media? Well, it's just because we've always done it or somebody said that's the best practice.

[00:18:29] Is that connected deep enough to ROI in the business or is it just some fluffy marketing KPIs that you're pointing out? Look at our engagement. That's fine. That may be the exact right things you're doing, but are you doing it with connected to a strategy and goals that give you the conviction to know?

[00:18:45] And for everybody on the team, including stakeholders or the C-suite to understand that this is what we're doing, why we're doing it and what it's doing to drive our business or the bottom line beyond just, you know, some KPIs about impressions and clicks and even conversions. So for those that are listening that maybe they never, hopefully if they've been listening to this podcast, you better darn have a strategy by now, but let's assume they do or, you know, they want to revise it or maybe they don't. They're, you know, they're a startup, what have you, what would be the first steps?

[00:19:15] And I mean, bang on, right? It's all about the business objectives and, and what can you do in digital to help you reach those business objectives? Where would you start? Yeah. So in the, so the, the five-step framework is called start and it's an acronym. And so strategy being the first phase or that S we dive into, we've got a few steps within that, but what we dive into is first off getting everybody in the same room if possible or aligned.

[00:19:41] It's been interesting to see even in old traditional organizations have been around 40, 50 years with staff members and leadership teams who have been in place in or in that company for 10, 20 years. They'll use the same inside baseball kind of terminology or industry language or, or even branded jargon. They'll use the exact same words and they'll think that they all are saying the same thing to me in terms of what their goal is.

[00:20:04] But then I'll dig deeper below the surface and we'll find out that there's five different definitions, one for each of those people, even though they're using the same word. So pressing into that and really defining the links and the paths between business outcomes or business ROI and marketing KPIs. We do a lot of auditing. We don't go into this with a negative lens or perception. We go into it with a neutral lens, but we're doing a lot of auditing.

[00:20:28] So we're not just relying on opinions or feelings of how it's been or what our successes have been or let somebody who's loudest in the room, maybe sales, we'll pick on them. Or IT or somebody else who's one personality who's louder than the others who thinks they know. And again, they can be absolutely spot on with what their past successes have been or who their audience is and how people buy or want to buy or whatnot.

[00:20:53] But we go through a lot of auditing of share with us, give us all of your assets, the customer journey mapping, personas, anything that you've got, your CRM setup, your workflows, all of that. Give us everything that you have if we can't find it publicly. And we're going to go audit that. We're also going to go do audits into the different categories of SEO, paid search, email, social platforms, all of that, just to understand what our starting point is.

[00:21:19] In some cases, we have to validate some of those things or challenge some assumptions or notions that exist. In other cases, everybody's really in alignment or agreement or in some like a recent one with an architectural firm, it was kind of a blank slate. Yes, they had a previous agency who was doing a bunch of activity, but they're like, let's pretend like we have nothing and let's blank slate this to look at what the opportunity is going forward.

[00:21:42] And we could do the ROI math pretty quickly with them, set some lead conversion or goals, qualified lead goals. And now it's forward through the rest of the process pretty quickly. You know, I think it's really interesting. And I applaud you for doing that because I think a lot of agencies, the approach is let's just get the VP of marketing to sign off or the CMO and we're good to go. And my approach has always been like yours.

[00:22:05] When I started doing social media marketing strategy back 15 years ago, let's bring together everybody that is affected by social media, which is the entire company. And it's really interesting. Yesterday, I was on a call and, you know, we're talking about the emergence of chief commercial officers, especially a B2B firm. So it's marketing, but marketing is also in many ways combined with sales. And now with generative AI and with customer service, it's also sort of coming under the umbrella.

[00:22:30] So what marketers do, what marketing is responsible for is just has actually expanded over time, which makes it even more critical, especially with AI, that you are integrated with what all the other departments are doing. So assuming that from these conversations, and I guess as an agency, you're sort of like orchestrating the entire company and seeing how, you know, marketing can help them reach the objectives. Once you find these objectives, I guess of the clients that you work with, do you find common objectives?

[00:22:58] I'm assuming at some point we get back to the traditional marketing, right? We want to increase brand awareness. Maybe it's employer branding. I don't know. But, you know, what do you see after going through that process with your clients? Yeah, you know, a lot of our clients, they're focused on lead generation. And so it's often a process where we work from the end and work backwards.

[00:23:27] And so what's not a consensus and where we need to go is takes us into that tactics phase. So the T after, which is the immediate next step. So we have strategy and then we have tactics. And if we can land on agreement on what the goal is at the deepest level, we can get it into the business. So maybe it's qualified leads and we need a certain number of them over a certain time period. Okay, cool. That's great.

[00:23:52] And we can articulate it in a sentence or two or three or a short paragraph, not an eight point font run on page long paragraph or sentence. And so if we can get it down to that, then we can take that as our filter and move into tactics. And that's where we want to challenge some biases. Do we love LinkedIn and Google search?

[00:24:14] Okay, well, in this era, especially as sources are becoming more diversified with AI search engines and functions and ways people are going to start finding content.

[00:24:25] Can we go through and in that tactics phase, find where our audience is not just taking, you know, personas and what we know about customer journey today, but going and challenging that, you know, I often will give an example of how for a phase of life with, you know, my kids where I'm end up laying on the floor next to their bed when they're going to sleep. And I might be mindlessly scrolling Facebook.

[00:24:48] That's actually where I saw and engage probably more with software vendors or things that I didn't expect to see over there. But LinkedIn is flooded with that all day. So that's what I ignore looking for other content. And then you caught me and actually click through and sign up for a demo for software of the one software provider that's in my Facebook feed while everyone else is family and friends and whatever other content that they're trying to sell me.

[00:25:14] So I'm not saying that's that's a magical tactic, but that's one of those things that if we think, well, we're B2B, we should never be over there. Well, maybe you shouldn't be over there initially, but maybe you should be remarketing over there, retargeting over there or or whatever integrated view that viewpoint that you're looking at. So there's a lot of different things to challenge and look at.

[00:25:34] We have some great projection tools and opportunities to to to go actually validate where our traffic might be and map it back to our customer journey, our funnels as well. And so that's really where where I like to take that goal that we set for the strategy and use it as a lens the rest of the way through the process. Gotcha. So we began with with the strategy, the business objectives, the tactics.

[00:25:59] So what what's next in the plan? I'm assuming at some point we need to see how we're doing a just pivot, but I'll let you do the talking. Yeah, we're almost there. So I go next to to the application phase as the A and that's where we're really looking at a lot of our assets. Are we ready? We know what we have. We know what worked. We know what we've mapped out kind of a high level strategy. We have goals. We have tactics now to support those tactics.

[00:26:26] What types of assets do we need? And do we have any gaps in our in our brand strategy? Do we have any product development gaps in in content around that? So we're looking at content. We're looking at display ads, inventory, if that's a thing, email marketing templates. That's in chiefly our website is our website ready and can it support what we've built up to this point?

[00:26:51] And so that's the A and that's getting that documented because if we forget about that and we wait till we have this beautiful plan and we start getting ready to enact the plan, we can lose a lot of momentum by taking three months to put it all on the shelf and have it get outdated while we're while we realize or keep backing into an issue of, oh, our website wasn't ready or we don't have these landing pages.

[00:27:14] So getting that inventory right and understanding that in that phase, I sandwich between tactics because you come right off of that tactics definition phase. Now you can define what assets you need and then we move into what I call the review page. So the R is for review. I don't call it reporting because it's a little bit more transformative or a lot more transformative than just your analytics or your dashboard or how you're going to report something.

[00:27:41] You're all in investment and ROI on marketing is the internal people that you pay that are in that department or that function. It's an outside agency consultant, freelancer or partners expense. It's your software and your tech stack expenses. So if you're just using an out of the box or even a configured analytics package, it's going to be blind to what you're paying for all those other things.

[00:28:07] It's just going to look at return on ad spend and things like that and leave some gaps in terms of understanding full ROI. Now this is a messy thing sometimes and why a lot of agencies and even marketing teams want to just report on marketing KPIs is they may not be privy to all of that information or how a CEO, CMO, CFO is going to look at the all in return on investment.

[00:28:30] And we've worked with large organizations who surprisingly, despite how big they are and what their budgets are like, they're siloed and don't have a full view or somebody who can answer that question and connect all the dots together.

[00:28:43] But it's still, I've learned along the way that I, I would rather ask the questions and press in on that than to hide behind marketing KPIs and be like, look, everything is green and up into the right and leave a gap there for somebody else to try to figure out how to connect the dots and calculate ROI later. I found the hard way that six months in a year and a year and a half in everything is up into the right marketing team agrees.

[00:29:12] Somebody somewhere wanted to connect the dots. I couldn't and budget cuts are happening and I get fired, even though everybody agreed we were doing a good job. So it's messy. It's hard to get into, but it's really, sometimes you have to challenge, you know, CRM. You have to go into, you know, enterprise level analytics and help connect some dots.

[00:29:32] But it's better to address it and understand it at this phase than to just assume it's configured properly or it will give you that holistic view to go back to your goal and be able to measure that. Yeah, two things I want to, well, two questions. Well, one question, one comment. The A phase, the assets, I have found when dealing with my clients as a fractional CMO that very, very few of them have enough assets. I, you know, I'll call it content, which I think we all agree is sort of the currency of digital media.

[00:30:02] Would you agree that most clients just don't have enough, whether it be landing pages, templates, whatever, a blog post, you know, I don't know. But what would your assessment be of, you know, the readiness of the average company when it comes to the content they need for a robust, modern digital marketing strategy?

[00:30:19] Yeah, I always give kudos and I hope that the clients that I give it to don't think I'm just, you know, placating them when I, when I say, when I give them a compliment for having robust content and the discipline to create it. So on the flip side of what I said earlier, if you're just creating it with no strategy, why are you doing it? What are you investing in?

[00:30:41] But if there's a great base of content and you have that discipline, that muscle, it's so much easier to leverage it and steer it and plug it in and make it strategic or refine it than to have to figure out how to make it and commit to it. So that's absolutely important. If the website's a problem, we're going to hold us back or be a big issue or we can't create the assets, then this is the time where we say time out. We've got to figure that out.

[00:31:09] And because we have a strategy and tactics that dictate that we should. And so now we're, these are building blocks for us and justify it and, and, and make us have to really come to terms with, you know, can we see this through for return on investment and invest in what we've agreed to will be where we should be. And then on the reporting, it's really funny because all these SEO tools and social media tools can all generate these automatic reports.

[00:31:38] And I can't tell you how many times I've seen these being distributed. There's just no value add by the agency when they're just generating those reports. So I applaud the fact that you're going, you have to go deeper when we're talking about business ROI anyway. So I applaud the fact you're doing, I urge everyone here, you know, all these tools will give you these reports to, it's really for their own ROI to show you that this is a great tool. And here's what you can do with it. But that is not really, I think a business ROI dashboard or marketing ROI dashboard for any means.

[00:32:08] I'm sure you'd agree, Corey, but I want to get onto the last one. We went to the S M A R. Now we're up to the T. So what is the final stage? Yeah. So we had strategy tactics, application and review. Now we're up to transformation. And I chose a large, big word for this. This is not just scheduling tactics, scheduling resources, but this is, this is the step. Where you take all of that. Now we're able to plot it out and get it ready to put in motion.

[00:32:35] So yes, there will be some, some scheduling, but the last thing you want to do is get this thing ready to go and not have it defined and actionable. So this is putting it into action and making it the plan that you need it to be. Because you can have this beautiful plan. And then two months into implementing it, get distracted by some new product launch or, you know, internal factors or external ones of, you know, the drive by by the CEO.

[00:33:02] Hey, have we thought about this audience or a new product launching or external ones like algorithm variable or new technology just dropped today or competitor consolidation or whatever it might be. So within that, you can, we've got enough issues that are going to come at us. And a lot of digital marketing happens by people who don't necessarily have digital marketing or SEO. For example, if I take one channel in their title.

[00:33:31] So for me to be successful as an SEO, unless I'm a super unicorn and I'm in an organization where I have authority to, to touch and make decisions and approve across all different categories. I'm going to need a developer or somebody in IT. I'm going to need a writer. I'm going to need an approver. If I'm in a finance or healthcare, probably need legal or compliance on my team and on my side. And you get this perfect plan lined out.

[00:33:58] And if you haven't identified the resources and gotten buy-in with them, you know, that's all great. And then you find out that your developer is booked for the next six months or somebody's going on parental leave. And now you can't execute on something or don't have a backup plan for them. So it's one thing to get the resources lined out. It's also another to plan for contingencies and also plan for when you get busy and make sure this thing doesn't go on the shelf.

[00:34:24] If we get hit by a drive-by request, how do we say timeout? And how does this change our priorities? Or do we get extra budget for this new initiative that's being added? Or do we have to reallocate? Or do we need to account for having some testing time built in there?

[00:34:40] And or if everything's going according to plan and we're head down, where are our checkpoints where we build in some agility to make sure that we're not blind to the things that are happening around us or, you know, ignoring them if the world is rapidly changing and we're just assembly lining the plan? I love that advice. It's almost like you, not that I'm like a pro-war person, but you prepare for like a war. But then once you're on the ground, the situation changes and you need to adapt.

[00:35:09] And it's something actually in digital marketing that very few people talk about. So that's really refreshing. And yes, things are going to change, right? I think just the emergence of ChatGPT alone has changed not just marketing, but business is a great example that's really fresh in our memory. So, you know, we're near the end of the interview. And I do want to ask you because, you know, as an agency owner working with a lot of companies, you know, it's 2025. We're in the first month of 2025.

[00:35:32] So it's a great time to ask you, you know, going forward for the next six to 12 months, what are the two to three things or the two to three areas vis-a-vis digital marketing that you think, you know, everybody listening or watching should be focusing in on? Yeah, I don't know too many digital marketers that just are resistant to change. Change is the constant.

[00:35:53] But if you feel like you're getting behind on SEO or not SEO with AI, if you feel like you're behind, you could be an SEO feeling like you're getting behind. But in any channel or any facet or especially a digital marketing or if you have digital marketing as a whole as you're in your purview, we all feel like we're behind on AI. I have friends who are doing some cutting edge AI development, software development, building some awesome, exciting platforms.

[00:36:21] And they feel like they're behind because there's an imposter syndrome and it's everywhere. And we all feel like we're behind. So find balance. If you're the type of person that chases the newest thing and the shiny object, okay, you might have to put some parameters around your testing and make sure that you're still focused on what works today and you don't take focus off of that.

[00:36:40] Or on the other end of the spectrum, if you're someone who you get to the end of your day and you meant to test or the end of your week and your month and you couldn't test AI for whatever function, build in some intentional time to test. So that's important. Change is coming. We can't stop it. If you're going to fight it, good luck. But embrace it at a level you're comfortable with and find your comfort zone because change, it's here. And leveraging it and making it our friend will make things a lot easier.

[00:37:10] So that's definitely not going to stop. That's not breaking news here that I'm sharing for 2025. But it's a little bit of the tough love that I tell myself and how I have to structure things. And my wife's a scientist. And it was funny, a couple weeks ago, we were sitting on a Friday night just with our laptops in front of the TV, both using chat GPT for different things and doing our testing from 7 p.m. to almost midnight.

[00:37:36] But doing it because we wanted to and enjoying it, it was fun to nerd out. But there are other days where I don't want to see my laptop and I don't want to nerd out. I don't want to be involved in that. So finding balance will be important because it's so open-ended in terms of the era that we're in now. A couple of other things that I've embraced are, especially if I get back into my SEO nerdery a little bit,

[00:38:00] is that we're already starting to see it's been a tiny change in terms of market share for Google. But the trend for Google sending less traffic to websites and the zero-click searches actually is not new with AI. And it started actually pre-COVID. Rand Fishkin has shared data. I was at an event where he shared some data that was eye-opening in 2019 about the trend of clicks from Google going down.

[00:38:27] But it seems like more recently with the emergence of AI and AI search engines and things like that, and Google, a lot of antitrust things and things it's going through that we're now preparing for what it looks like with a more diversified set of traffic sources. And to me, that's exciting because now we're not all in our eggs in one basket, whether Google likes us or not, and Google dictates the rules. Don't get me wrong. 2025 is still going to be big in terms of Google from a search perspective.

[00:38:55] It's under 90%, but it still owns almost 9 out of 10 in terms of being a traffic source. But the diversification will make our jobs more challenging because now we've got to figure out how to be ranked and positioned in all the AI engines and sources. But it'll allow us also, in my view, it's almost refreshing to be able to focus more on quality and less on quantity and shift that conversation,

[00:39:23] especially if our KPIs have been set up and our goals previously have been set up about, well, we want to increase traffic year over year. Do we really want to? Can we challenge some more old school thinking and models of commission of ad spin and other things and say, let's look at if we weren't keyed on the end goal, let's start going there because we can do more with a quality approach and across the places where our audiences actually are and where they're going to be,

[00:39:52] rather than focusing on just raw numbers of how many clicks we're getting to the site, whether that matters or not. Yeah. And then probably one more thing, maybe a third category is navigating what I feel like is a third or fourth year in a row of things being uneven in terms of budgets, in terms of whether we use the R word and recession or not.

[00:40:17] I mean, I think that for a couple of years ago, that was a fear and it slowed things down. But whether we go crazy as an economy and M&A happens, there's just the pockets of clients and industries and companies where budgets are tight and models are strained. There are others where it's exciting and there's tons of growth and rapid growth and you're breaking everything. And there's a lot of consolidation and a lot of M&A activity. So it's weird.

[00:40:46] And so sometimes we're doing more with less. Sometimes we're given huge budgets and we got to figure out how to leverage them, but making sure that we account for whatever it looks like and to not be surprised by more macro economic changes. That may not make sense if you're seeing great success in a certain channel and then all of a sudden you're told to turn it off. You're turning it over to somebody else. Yeah, great advice. Thank you for that, Corinne.

[00:41:12] And I think a lot of it is, you know, follow the data and, you know, big fan of Rand Fishkin. I don't know anyone in the SEO world who isn't a big fan of Rand Fishkin and just his intelligent way of looking at SEO and marketing and business in general. And, you know, funny, I was on a conversation with another agency and primarily B2B. And they were saying, well, yeah, clicks have gone down over the past few years. But like, what's the weather today? You used to go to Google to do that. And now you have a weather app. So the clicks that are going down, are they really impacting your business or not? Right.

[00:41:41] And it even more gives you more reason to really dig deeper into content and give more invaluable advice so that when people do search for those things, which they are still going to search for, that you come up as a result. So really great advice to look at all this holistically, including. Yeah, they've been saying we've had a recession coming for like every year of my life. I think it's almost like the big earthquake is going to hit Southern California. So, Corey, this has been awesome. I'd say anybody who has any questions or just wants to tap into another, you know, thought leader in the space to reach out to Corey.

[00:42:11] But Corey, obviously go to Amazon where you can get the Digital Marketing Success Plan. But Corey, where else should we send people that are watching or listening to this? Yeah, I've got a companion website for the book as well. And because that's a long title, I've shortened it to the DMSP.com for Digital Marketing Success Plan. You can find the Start Planning Framework there.

[00:42:32] We're adding some resources to the site and it'll link you over to Amazon and it'll give you a chance to find, you know, social media handles or to just send me a note if I can be helpful in any way. No sales pitch attached to it. No sales funnels there. Just a simple contact form. If I could be helpful through my agency, that's Voltage.Digital. That's where we do the kind of guided do it for you process version of implementing Digital Marketing Success Plan.

[00:43:01] But yeah, pick up the book. I encourage you to. And obviously, if you're a Kansas City Chiefs fan, you'll want to reach out and connect with Corey as well. One of the nicest Chiefs fans I've ever met, I must say. So anyway, thank you again, Corey. This has been awesome. Appreciate your time and your expertise. And hopefully at some point at some conference, we'll have a chance to meet in person. Thanks. I appreciate it, Neil. I hope you enjoyed that interview. So hope that you'll hit that subscribe button.

[00:43:26] I record basically every other episode is an expert interview with people like Corey and other experts that I've interviewed here. And the other half are solo episodes. And yes, this is the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. So I do try to cover a wide range of topics. Everywhere from digital marketing to SEO to content marketing to email marketing to social media marketing to influencer marketing. If you are involved in the digital marketing of your business, you need to learn a lot.

[00:43:51] And I'm here to share all of my expertise and tap into the expertise of my special guests. And hey, I mentioned this at the end of last week's episode, but I am putting together a special community, which is going to be entirely free of my biggest fans, listeners, book readers, clients. Really, anyone who has bought one of my books and actually read it and actually reviewed it on an online site, I'm going to be inviting you to a special community.

[00:44:19] So if you've read Digital Threads, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, The Age of Influence, Maximize Your Social, and you have already reviewed it online, you will be hearing from me. If you haven't reviewed it yet, this is a great time to review it. Send me a screenshot to neil at neilshafer.com so I can make sure that I can invite you into the special community. It is the least I can do to thank you for all of your support. Another way to support me is by actually leaving a review for this podcast.

[00:44:44] I've been trying for a while to hit that magical 100 review number on Apple Podcasts. With every review that you provide me, it gets me one step closer to that. So thank you in advance. And that's it for another, hopefully you found exciting episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer, signing off. You've been listening to Your Digital Marketing Coach. Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilshafer.com.

[00:45:13] Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilshafer.com to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First Group Coaching Membership Community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on Your Digital Marketing Coach.