Your 24/7 Digital Marketing Sales Team.

Digital Marketing
April 29, 2025
digital marketing,marketing,buyer journey

Framework for Goal-Focused Marketing Using Proven Strategies to Match Your Business Outcomes.

63% of small businesses report that their websites fail to generate leads.

How can you turn a static website into a revenue machine that works while you sleep? This article is backed by case studies and data.

A few insights we will look at:

  • Why generic marketing fails (with 2025 industry benchmarks)
  • How to audit your site’s “salesperson potential”
  • A 5-step system to align every page with business goals

The Broken Promise of Digital Marketing

A 2024 HubSpot study found:

  • 71% of websites act as digital brochures (newspaper-like websites that never change or adapt)
  • 82% lose leads and don’t convert them into sales.
  • 68% of owners can’t trace revenue to specific pages.

Why Generic Solutions Fail.

Most traditional agencies use a “Spray and Pray” approach. Their approach will usually consist of one of the following:

  • Redesigning for aesthetics, not function.
  • Pushing generic blogs irrelevant to the buyer journeys.
  • Report vanity metrics (e.g., “traffic up 20%”)

The spray and pray method might work for a while, until it doesn’t. Traffic then drops, which means more and more blog posts. The aesthetic redesign completely neglects best practices (the proper way to do things). Then the report comes in. Which you don’t care to understand.

Why? Well, because it’s not focused on your business goals.

There are rarely the necessary insights needed from these agencies

Insights such as a buyer journey, customer segmentation, and audience personas. Most importantly, goal-oriented research.

Every decision you make in your company should fulfil 3 main things:

  1. Your vision for the future of your company (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG for short)
  2. Your near-future goals (achievable in 1-2 years)
  3. Your OKR (Short Term Objectives)

Why are insights important?

Insights, simply put, tell you what to do, where to do it, and what to say. It’s the fundamentals of marketing. You might say, “Well, my business is still early”. Yes, that may be true, yet insights are still required to inform you of what the next step is.

The consequence of neglecting insights boils down to: Money burned.

Instead of spending this much on 10 AI-generated blog posts. Spend that money on anything that gives you a return on your marketing investment, and more. That’s where insight plays a role.

Yes, marketing is not hard facts; it’s testing and adjusting, trial and error. Yet, throwing your fishing line, hoping and praying for a catch, is not an effective approach.

The Problem with Generic Marketing

87% of businesses report wasted budgets on marketing tactics that don’t align with their goals. Traditional agencies often push:

  • Pre-packaged SEO/service bundles
  • “Proven” templates reused across industries
  • Isolated tactics (e.g., ads without website optimisation)

This creates three critical failures:

  1. Misdirected Efforts: Social media campaigns for businesses needing local SEO.
  2. Resource Drain: Blogging for companies that convert via phone calls.
  3. Growth Plateaus: Initial gains from flashy tactics that can’t scale.

The Fluid Framework, Our Core Philosophy

“Only what you need, only when you need it.”

We reject cookie-cutter solutions. Instead, we execute a stage-by-stage process. This process works because we cover all the foundational elements of each channel.

Our foundational first approach brings various benefits, 2 of which stand out:

  • Creating more potential to increase and scale your digital marketing.
  • Eliminating potential obstacles/ roadblocks or limiting factors.
  • Tying everything together: Your business and individual marketing channels support each other.
  • Audits, Marketing & Business Goals
    • Completion of a required in-depth discovery session with you and your team. In this session, we extract various insights vital for any work thereafter.
    • We then audit your current state to find gaps and learn what works and what doesn’t. This is an opportunity to verify where you stand, both in the market and against the competition.
    • We identify 1-3 marketing objectives (E.g. “Increase qualified leads by 40% in 6 months with SEO”). Marketing objectives are directly related to your business goals. Say your business goal is to gain 200 new customers in six months; the marketing objectives tie into achieving that goal.
  • Stage-Specific Solutions (Example for a local service business):
    • Stage 1: Research, more research, and more research.
    • Stage 2: Optimise Google Business Profile + complete website overhaul (if required)
    • Stage 3: Collecting Customer Reviews + Retargeting emails for cart abandoners.
    • Stage 4: Running Ad campaigns + building authority with content marketing
    This example demonstrates that each service are stages made specifically for your business.
  • Execution
    • 6-month roadmap with foundational aspects covered first.
    • Move resources when goals/conditions change.
    • Data analysis allows agile adaptation for continuous improvement.
  • Reporting
    • Track only metrics tied to goals (e.g., “Cost per booked appointment” vs. vanity metrics like social likes).

How to earn more from marketing.

You may be asking, “Where do I even start?”.

Here’s a simple system you can use for actionable steps in your business and marketing.

Step 1: Locking in your goals

Start simple: in the short term, what do you want to achieve, and when do you want to achieve it by?

Example: 50 new sales in the next 3 months.

Once that goal is locked in, think about how you will achieve that goal. Will it be from knocking on doors, social media posting, or paid ads?

Then combine it all. 50 New sales in 3 months by knocking on 80 doors.

A well-known proven strategy to lock in your goals is the SMART system.:

  • S – Specific: Be specific about the goal.
  • M – Measurable: Are you able to measure the outcome? (Eg, 50 sales)
  • A – Achievable: Is it possible to do?
  • R – Realistic: Can it happen?
  • T – Time bound: When should it be achieved?

Example: A security company shifted from “We want more traffic” to “15% more online bookings from high-risk neighbourhoods in 12 weeks.”

The goals you set are a cornerstone of what actions you should take tomorrow and the day after. It’s like Google Maps, giving you directions and which road is best to take.

But if you don’t know where you want to go, you’ll end up where you started.

Step 2: The 24/7 Salesperson Blueprint

Every company should have its in-house digital team as much as they have a sales team.

Digital Marketing Strategy? In 2025, focusing on one marketing channel only is risky. When investing, it’s very common to hear that you should diversify and invest in a variety.

This holds for marketing. Marketing should be diversified to reduce risk. What’s working now should be prioritised. Say the algorithm changes and you lose that one channel, you will be secure from the other platforms. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

This is where we come. To support your company with our holistic (broad) approach and a strategy made for your business. Get in touch with us to learn more about how we can diversify your company’s marketing portfolio.

Are you ready to invest in marketing as much as you invest in sales? If not, we are not right for you.

That strategy must work in conjunction with your customers to be effective. That’s where Buyer Journeys play a role.

Buyer Journeys tell us where to present our products/ services, and who to show them to.

There are 5 steps in the buyer journey.

It’s called the AIDA formula,

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, Post Action

The buyer journey is the stages a buyer goes through when they are buying something. It has no particular order.

What you should care about is what marketing you are doing at each stage?

Step 3: Content That Closes

To continue from the previous stage.

You shouldn’t be spray and praying with your marketing.

The marketing strategy falls into what marketing to do for each stage of the buyer journey. In this way, you are sure not to lose a customer by missing the current stage they are at.

A buyer journey could look like:

Your product gets attention from the buyer through Instagram. They then go to your Instagram profile and become interested in what your product does for them. They then gain a desire to buy the product from your website. They decide to take action and buy the product. You send them an email a few months later, and they take action to buy the product again.

This is a simple, watered-down overview of the buyer journey. Keep in mind that the buyer may jump back and forth between stages or skip a stage. There is no particular order.

Now you know what marketing to do. You then need to consistently create content for each channel.

The 3:1 Rule of High-Converting Content.

For every R1 spent on content creation, R3 must be traced to a measurable return on investment.

Sustaining Momentum

Your digital strategy is now in motion. Traffic may be flowing in, but the work doesn’t stop there. This stage is one of the most critical. It either burns money or it pays for your next holiday.

Traffic alone is a vanity metric. It may bring people to your website or social media. How many of those people become buying customers?

This directly ties back to those insights we uncovered earlier. Every stage before this needs the insights for your marketing to be effective.

Track 3 metrics that matter:

  1. Conversion Rate (% of leads that turn into paying customers)
  2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) (The cost of getting a single paying customer)
  3. Return on investment (ROI)

Example: A plumbing company found that their “Emergency Leak Guide” PDF generated R18,000/month in leads. This justifies a budget increase for similar assets.

Your Roadmap to 24/7 Sales

Step 1: What are your goals

Whether you decide to higher an agency or do it yourself. Always make sure your goals are forefront. Never let anyone do anything against your goals. Not specialists or agencies.

Ask your team:

  1. “What’s our biggest revenue goal this year?” (Ex: “50 new clients to get R500,000”)
  2. “What’s blocking us right now?” (Ex: “Website doesn’t explain our process”)
  3. “What’s working that we can double down on?” (Ex: “Clients love our free consultations”)

Week 1: Audit & Align

  • Run a “Murder Board” session: Identify what is working and what’s not working for you. Ask your sales team what they think could help them close more deals.
  • Define 1 SMART goal with your team
  • Create a task list focused on achieving that 1 smart goal. Be as specific as possible. Ambiguity will only cause constraints later on.

Month 1: Build Your Sales Team

  • Make sure your staff know and agree with your goals. If your team is not aligned with your goals, it’s like a boat where everyone is rowing in a different direction.
  • Create basic, easy-to-understand SOPS for your team to follow. Whiteboard software works well for visual processes.
  • Review your efforts with your team every week.

Quarter 1: Optimise & Scale

  • Identify what is driving more sales and what is burning cash.
  • Delete what’s burning cash, and continuously improve whatever is driving sales.

Conclusion

Websites that act as 24/7 sales teams aren’t futuristic – they’re mandatory. By aligning every marketing channel with business goals, you can finally relieve the pressure on yourself and your team.

References