Marketing Plans and Metrics

Because you can predict and measure web marketing, you must.

DISC's thirteen years of search marketing and our seasoned business judgment qualify us to either advise you on or fully manage your planning and measurement.

DISC's founder and CEO, Rob Laporte, has a background perfectly suited for web marketing plans and measurement. In the 1980s, Rob worked as an Assistant Account Executive in direct response marketing for a major Boston ad agency and later as a Project Director for a survey research firm. Rob's seven years as an academic at UMass Amherst trained him, and through him the DISC team, in using reason and evidence to arrive at sound rationales for all web marketing plans. Though thoroughly researched and reasoned, DISC's plans are action plans, ready for your team to implement immediately.

DISC does not accept clients for whom we doubt positive ROI. In most cases, there's no need to perform an initial feasibility report to know that search marketing will achieve positive ROI, but if we have any doubt, we insist on such a study before you spend thousands of dollars. While search marketing has nebulous branding affects beyond direct response, and while social media presents special challenges in ROI measurement, we at DISC continue to believe that web marketing should be held close to the line-item rigor of direct response marketing. Some web marketing channels are hyped or not well suited to your web site. ROI projections are vital in your resource allocation and in preventing failed investments.

While ROI planning and reporting is part of every service we offer -- especially our Conversion Rate Optimization – DISC has specific packages that will help your business allocate marketing dollars:

Customization of your Google Analytics Reports.
Starting at $525; averaging $1600; large sites & businesses can go much further.
"If it's worth doing, it's worth measuring" is an adage that is central to web marketing. These days, reporting software tremendously over-produces data, however impressive the reports may look. The art of tracking and reporting is to arrive at the simplest possible formatting of actionable data. DISC's 13+ years of ROI reporting enable us to do just that. DISC will set-up neat custom reports within your Google Analytics, and we will confer with your team to arrive at a monthly report format which (1) shows the monetary value of your web marketing initiatives, and (2) reveals successes, problems, and opportunities. Because website metrics inform all we do for clients, we have learned how to make Google Analytics and other popular stat packages optimize your marketing management. Many services offer such reporting for hefty monthly fees (and sometimes using Google Analytics beneath), and still their reports, though dazzling, are rarely exactly what you want. Instead, pay for one customization of your free and incredibly powerful Google Analytics. For complete reporting, this information should be put into a format that factors your unique marketing situation. Such factors are your various average conversion rates, sound assignment of monetary value of each kind of conversion, relevant labor costs (DISC's and yours), and other pertinent data, like traffic and conversions from non-search marketing channels, or conversion funnels from key pages. DISC will work with your team to set-up this simple yet powerful spreadsheet that your team can use themselves, with interpretations done by DISC as needed.

DISC's Web Marketing Plans

SEO ROI Report
$1250
All sites should use an ROI reporting format that assesses problems, opportunities, and ROI of SEO. Such reporting may seem like optional bean counting, but in web marketing such reporting selects and directs optimal tactics. You can't know what to do, what to spend, and what not to worry about doing, if you don't see the ever-shifting landscape of your web marketing results. Using our years of experience in ROI reporting for all kinds of companies, DISC will provide a template and step-by-step guide that will measure your most important trends.
Search Engine Marketing Opportunities
$1950 to $2850
This feasibility plan ascertains your current rankings, the number of relevant searches in the top search engines, and the quantity of web sites that compete for those searches, in order to arrive at a predicted amount of relevant traffic to your site should you implement or expand search engine marketing. This plan can often find new opportunities for expanding or starting your business, or for extending your product line to capture new demand. Its main purpose is to enable you to decide whether or how much to invest in SEM. It includes an excel spreadsheet for playing with scenarios and tracking ROI throughout implementation.
Search Engine Marketing ROI
$3600 to $4500
This includes the above, plus analysis of your server statistics and gross profit and/or value of qualified leads, in order to predict the conversion rates and profit of your search engine referrals should you implement or expand search marketing. You arrive at predicted and measurable ROI for investing in SEO, shopping comparison sites, PPC, and other paid placement in the search engines. It includes an excel spreadsheet for playing with scenarios and tracking ROI throughout implementation.
Complete Web Marketing Plan
$9500 to $15,500
These plans create a precise roadmap to your online success. They include all of the above, plus (1) gathering available web marketing statistics relevant to your industry; (2) reporting on the comparative merits and the best methods of other web marketing channels, like social media, affiliate marketing, local search marketing, internet yellow pages (IYP), SEO'd public relations, email campaigns, banner advertising, and link campaigns; and (3) advising on coordination of web marketing with traditional marketing. It includes several ROI excel spreadsheets for playing with scenarios and tracking ROI throughout implementation.
Social Media Marketing Plan
$1575 to $3500
If you have doubts about social media for your business, DISC can begin with ascertaining how appropriate are social media venues for your business, for $525. DISC's partner in the firm, Jennifer Williams, is gifted in this area, and in fact recently got published on the front page of FastCompany.com, on the cover of the search marketing field's premier print magazine, Visibility Magazine (12/08), "When it Comes to Social Media, Think Tribal", and in summer ‘10 her article on neuro-marketing took the entire cover of Visibility. Jennifer authors clients' social media plans and does most of the consulting in this area. (Though Jennifer is very active in social media through her affiliated Verilliance.com and other channels, DISC does little social media marketing for our own website because we have not had to – just as we won't recommend anything you don't need.) If one or more venues are appropriate, DISC will produce a precise social media plan, including Facebook, Linked-In, Digg, how-to sites, Twitter, review web sites and platforms, and selections among the many secondary venues. ROI projections are included in a spreadsheet that you can play with and use to measure results.
Affiliate Marketing Plan
$5000
This comprehensive plan vets the top affiliate marketing networks and their applicability to your business. It is about 25 pages and includes an ROI excel spreadsheet for playing with scenarios and tracking ROI throughout implementation.
SEO'd Public Relations Plan
$1650
This plan provides all you need for using web-based public relations and SEO together. It includes how best to put news and press releases on your site; recommended news distribution services and the costs of their tiers of service; and a sequential action plan you can implement step by step immediately. This does not include SEO copywriting of press releases, which DISC can do as part of our standard SEO work. For each round of press releases, expect to pay about $400 to the PR network recommended in the report.
Link Marketing Plan
$2450
DISC updates and customizes for you our comprehensive prioritization of all aspects of link marketing. It displays your inbound links in an excel table sortable by PageRank, TLD (.edu, .com, etc.), landing pages (and all links leading to no longer existing pages on your site, which can be 301 redirected for immediate PageRank boost), no-follow links, anchor text, deep link to home page ratio, and more. The plan includes a list of select firms, some off-shore, for performing the long and labor-intensive process of soliciting links from good web sites and for buying, as legitimately as possible, links through one or more of the best link exchanges. It also explains how to use (and not to use) social media for inbound links.
SEO Technical and CMS-SEO Audits
$1750 and $2625 respectively, per web site.
Though not a plans per se, these audits are priority one in SEO, and parts of these audits should be run monthly, quarterly, and yearly. Just one SEO technical problem – and most untreated sites have several – can depress your current organic traffic and waste future SEO efforts. These audits help you to plan which of the many SEO tasks you should do first and where to invest subsequent SEO.