Marketing is the lifeblood of lead generation and pipeline—so ensuring your digital marketing strategy is effective, and constantly evaluating it for improvement, are critical components to success for any business.

How can you properly evaluate the health of your digital marketing strategy? One effective method is to examine the relationship between your collection of digital marketing creative (Digital Marketing Toolkit) and where these assets live within your prospects' path to purchase (Buyer’s Journey).

Comparing perspectives

In essence, it's a matter of perspective: evaluating your Digital Marketing Toolkit involves looking at the variety of assets, their quality, and the consistency of that quality across your full library of digital marketing collateral.

The Buyer's Journey, on the other hand, provides crucial context that should inform the balance of your Digital Marketing Toolkit: the quantity of each asset based on the specifics of your buyer's unique path-to-purchase and the current challenges, needs, and goals of your prospective customer.

Digital Marketing Toolkit

How many of each asset do we have within each category?
Do we have a good variety of asset types?
How are assets, or categories, performing (against each other, or the competition)?

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Buyer's Journey

Does the quantity of assets within each category align with buyer needs and marketing goals?
Is our variety of asset types balanced across our prospects' unique path to purchase to properly support the goals of each phase?
Is the performance of each asset properly aligned with the specific needs of the buyer's phase it inhabits?

In this way, it’s possible to see that simply evaluating your Digital Marketing Toolkit without the context of the Buyer’s Journey could lead to an incomplete picture that misaligns with larger strategies. Published marketing assets should align with the specific needs of your buyers at their specific place within their path to purchase, and your company’s current marketing strategy and targets.

A quick example

Digital Marketing Toolkit

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Buyer's Journey

Say you’ve analyzed your Digital Marketing Toolkit and discovered your company hasn’t published as many videos as your competition. This is only one piece of the puzzle in order to determine whether to publish more videos in order to properly compete—adding context of the Buyer’s Journey could tell a different story.

Perhaps company research reveals that buyers aren’t getting stuck in the “Discover” phase (meaning that your company doesn’t have an awareness problem)—but instead, the hang-up in their path to purchase is mostly in the “Try” phase (where prospects are evaluating your solution in much more detail).

This evidence supports the possibility that your Digital Marketing Toolkit does not need more video, but rather more demos that provide greater visibility into your product and details about it.

Assets along the Buyer's Journey

Different assets in your toolkit belong in different places in the Buyer’s Journey—pushing prospects forward from top-of-funnel awareness (Discover), through mid-funnel (Believe) and bottom-of-funnel (Try), until they reach your end goal: purchase.

While there's a vast array of asset types, we've attempted to illustrate many of the common ones above and map them to the phase of the Buyer's Journey they're most often associated with. Each asset published must align with the phase in which it inhabits in order to maximize the success of the asset, and to properly push prospects toward the next phase.

Looking for examples of each asset type? Check out some of

Digital Marketing Toolkit

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Buyer's Journey

Digital Marketing Toolkit

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Buyer's Journey

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