Our digital marketing strategy

Our digital marketing strategy is proven to drive traffic while increasing leads and conversions. We produce results-driven strategies and campaigns that expand your business and enhance your bottom line. By uniting market research, competitor analysis, and an in-depth content strategy plan, we are able to produce a digital marketing research (DMR) report that informs our strategy throughout the project’s life cycle.

Market ResearchCompetitive AnalysisTracking & Data AnalyticsContent Strategy

Market research is the core of our digital marketing deliverables, and it informs all digital strategy surrounding your target audience identification and their buying behaviors. With a wide assortment of proprietary research and SEO tools, we pinpoint not only the major segments, but also the detailed persona archetypes, your target audience members, and their online behaviors and patterns.

Market Segmentation Analysis

We divide a broad target market into subsets of consumers with common needs. This allows us to implement strategies to target each subset’s needs individually using the most effective media channels and touch-points.

Customer Person Research

We conduct meticulous customer personal research that provides a guide to creating relevant content and social campaigns that addresses the specific needs of the key people you want to reach.

Understanding your online competition and exactly why and where it outperforms your business is a crucial component to building a successful digital marketing campaign. We identify your search and social media competitors and meticulously examine their client personas, key comparable ranking signals, and offline strategies to gain the most insight possible into exactly how and where to focus time and effort.

Competitor Identification

The first step is to pinpoint exactly who your direct online competitors are, in what regions, and keywords they’re using. Using our proprietary software, we analyze hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords and phrases and scrub tens of thousands of websites to unquestionably establish your competition.

Competitor Analysis

We take the essential competitor data gathered in the identification process dig deep into the companies with whom you truly compete with. We examine where, why and how they’re making conversions, what types of content creation consistently boosts traffic, and how your competition’s buying personas align with your own strategy.

Wins and Losses

Now that we not only know your direct online competition but also how it’s succeeding and failing, we can use this valuable insight to create and implement a successful digital marketing campaign for you.

Continual Analysis and Recommendations

AF Services’s competitive analysis is a continuous process that not only benchmarks against your competition quarterly but also can review competitors continually and be setup to alert the team and clients when a competitor outranks in a specific region or for a particular keyword.

Tracking & Data Analytics

Many digital marketing firms scrutinize over analytical data in a vacuum. The digital marketers view, implement SEO changes, and blindly test down the road, hoping for a boost in conversions and traffic. At AF Services, our digital marketing team works with designers and developers when performing analyzing data to make better, more informed decisions—from altering calls to action or improving page load speed—because the right solution isn’t always going to involve simple SEO adjustments.

Our Core: Connecting Marketing Hours with Results

Remember algebra—and having to show your work? The reason your math teacher insisted on this is simple: the process of arriving at an answer is more valuable than is merely providing the correct answer. The same is true on the Internet. If you don’t know what you did last month to boost conversions and to grow traffic, how can you repeat it? Every task we implement is recorded, tracked, and compared with analytic data within our proprietary client dashboard. This allows us, and the client, to perform data analysis to see which strategies work and which need improvement.

How we track

There’s much more to analytics than merely examining past performances. Identifying the specific tools and interpreting charts are just the tip of the iceberg. To get the full picture, along with your current metrics data gaps, we assess your Internet marketing performance on multiple dimensions and make informed, accountable choices.

Collection

Efficient data collection is a fundamental first step toward identifying untapped metrics, developing actionable reports, and ultimately, driving profits. While we gain plenty of insight from vanity metrics (e.g., pageviews, bounce rates, and social followers), the bulk of our content strategy is built on metrics involving action (e.g., who is coming to your site, who is converting and from which channels, and what conversions are deepening relationships).

Analysis

What does this data mean, and what is the team supposed to do with it? shana joe

With the knowledge gained through not only the data but also our extensive market and competitor research, our digital marketers work with designers, developers, and writers to produce actionable reports that directly inform content strategy.

Improvement

You won’t meet too many agencies that proactively test and optimize site content regularly. Using our proprietary tracking tools and a variety of third-party resources (e.g., heat maps, scroll depth tracking, click-tracking overlays) to test, we never stop improving our clients’ conversion rates and usability.

Our WordPress Plugin

A while back, we found it was fairly cumbersome to add event tracking manually to a website. As such, our digital marketers and developers teamed up to create the Event Tracking plugin for WordPress. The plugin offers users an effective method of tracking engagement with specific website elements—and it’s able to automatically feed into your Google Analytics reports.

The plugin can track:

Social media interactions
Any file downloads
All form submissions
Essentially, any link you wish to track

Our market research and competitor analysis allows us to develop informed information architecture and intuitive wayfinding and can confidently identify and create all elements to include on any webpage or in marketing campaign. And the content strategy and implementation is merely the beginning. Everything we create is tracked, tested, and analyzed, which allows us to continually identify exactly what is working and what might need improvement.

What is content strategy?

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, compelling content. This emerging field encompasses every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, and management. We draw from our clients’ business goals and their specific user needs to audit existing content and then create a comprehensive plan for future content—clearly defining which content will be published and why.

Information Architecture

Now that all the research and analysis is complete, we can start on the first step toward building site content: information architecture (IA). IA is essentially the organization and labeling of information to help users complete tasks, easily find what they’re looking for, and fully understand what they’ve found—skills that clients find is easier said than done. We go well beyond foundational IA practices and spend a great deal of time making choices about how to best present and organize content throughout the site to funnel users to the most applicable CTA. The result is a focused sitemap, carefree user flow, intuitive navigational structures, and improved conversion rates.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a graphical representation of website architecture able to illustrate the hierarchal relationship among pages. We spend time structuring pages into groups, often with distinct subgroups, generating a hierarchy of content. Decisions about how exactly to categorize and cluster pages can have dramatic consequences on usability and conversions. Each sitemap is highly scrutinized and refined to strike the perfect balance between deep and flat hierarchy. While website visitors never see this type of visualization (below), the shape of the hierarchy has an enormous impact on the end user’s experience.

Deep

sitemap-deep Deep sitemaps only have a few categories on each level and tend to hold a user’s hand. This type of hierarchy requires more clicking and guides users through generic categories and uncluttered menus to lead the users to the page(s). Many deep hierarchies require alternative navigation options and shortcuts to allow more savvy users to find information quickly and easily.

Flat

sitemap-flat Flat sitemaps give users a direct path to content. This allows specific content to be easily discovered without forcing users to drill down through broad categories. While flat hierarchies tend to be easier to use and less confusing than is burying content under multiple intervening layers, flat hierarchies can also be overwhelming by presenting too much information at one time—forcing users to skim or to fail to read the list closely enough.

User flows

While we’re always thinking about how our client’s audience will progress through the site, we design user flows to verify our assumptions, refine the sitemap further, and determine navigation structures—all working together to funnel users into the most pertinent CTA. Using each target persona (developed during our initial market research and competitive analysis) combined with the client’s objective, we design flows that are tied to clear goals and a defined buying cycle.

Wireframes

The renowned web developer and content strategy advocate, Jonathon Kahn, once said,

“A wireframe without a corresponding content strategy and a realistic CMS design is a work of fantasy. Fantasy wireframes lead to broken experiences, unmet goals, and angry stakeholders.”

It’s easy to let aesthetics muffle strategy—in fact, all too often, firms and freelancers consider wireframes the first step of design rather than using wireframes as a final step in the planning process. Wireframes are the result of focused research, extensive analysis, and informed information architecture—all coming together as the initial website design begins to emerge.

In many cases, we take wireframes a step further and send clients a prototype of the project, allowing them to experience how the design will function. This enables our designers to spend less time trying to communicate their vision and more time iterating and improving usability.

wireframes