Digital Marketing Coaching

As a digital marketing coach, I work with marketing leaders and marketing teams to bring confidence to their digital marketing efforts. From developing a strategy to hands-on learning of tactics and platforms, coaching can take a marketing team from overwhelmed to empowered.
With coaching, we’ll work together differently than you would with a digital marketing agency. With an agency, you’re delegating or outsourcing your digital marketing projects. Most of the time an agency isn’t going to “pull back the curtain” on what they’re doing.

What’s Included?

My digital marketing coaching engagements are always focused on five key areas that are highly correlated with top performance:

Goals

This is the most common area I see marketers struggle with. Not because they can’t set goals. But because the goals aren’t aligned with the rest of the organization, or there are too many goals, or they’re not clearly defined. We’ll work together to identify clear goals that will win the support of your entire organization.

Strategy

Once goals are determined, it’s time to build a roadmap for how you’ll support those goals. With so many options for digital marketing tactics, I’ll help you focus on the right tactics to build a digital marketing strategy that you can confidently share with others in your organization.

Process

With 15+ years of digital marketing experience working in organizations and agencies, I have a proven process to share for almost every digital marketing strategy or tactic. These processes will allow your team to confidently see through your strategy.

Resources

Marketers are often one of the most overburdened teams within an organization. Whether it’s a one-person team or multiple people, it’s always important to identify where a team doesn’t have capacity and needs either do less, or bring in cost-effective resources.

Data

Analytics and data help us understand what has worked in the past, what hasn’t, and helps inform ongoing digital strategy. Most marketers fall into the trap of sharing too little or too much with their leadership teams. We’ll work together to help you craft a compelling narrative that your leadership team will understand.

What’s the Process?

Let’s be clear — this isn’t a pre-recorded, on-demand style coaching program. This one-to-one or one-to-team coaching that is personalized to your organization, team, goals, and challenges. You’ll be coached by me (Ryan). You’ll be able to bring questions and ideas to each coaching session, and you’ll be able to receive hands-on coaching and training.

Discovery

To be a successful coaching engagement, I’ll need to learn as much as I can (and as quickly as I can) about your organization, what you offer, and your audience. Luckily I have a defined process for capturing this information in just one 90-minute meeting.

Quarterly Digital Marketing Plan

At the core of our coaching program is the development of a quarterly digital marketing plan that will outline your goals, strategy, tactics, and measurement plan. This will be the guide that confidently guides you and your team during the entire quarter.

Ongoing Coaching Sessions

Depending on your needs, we’ll schedule weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly coaching sessions for accountability, to review and update your digital marketing plan, to discuss current challenges and opportunities, and for one-on-one or group coaching.

Example Coaching Sessions

Branding / Positioning

Most ineffective marketing can be traced back to either the wrong channels or the wrong positioning. What I see most often are companies “swimming in a sea of sameness” with their competition, saying the exact same things to the same audience. Strong positioning helps identify your unique value propositions and the audience that values them most.

Online Marketing Audit

Not sure how your past efforts are performing? Wondering how your online presence stacks up against your competitors? An audit can uncover what’s working and what’s not to inform a better plan moving forward.

SEO Strategy

SEO is often a black box for most organizations. The algorithm is constantly changing and there’s often not a clear plan to increase exposure and traffic from search engines. I help organizations understand where they stand in search engines and develop a clear plan for SEO growth.

Content Marketing

Often paired with an SEO strategy, content marketing is one of the best ways to engage your audience and drive traffic to your site. But most organizations are left guessing what to write about. I bring a proven content marketing framework that I’ve used throughout my career as well as content marketing templates that your organization can implement right away.

Digital Advertising Strategies

Organizations that need coaching usually fall into two categories: They’re advertising on digital channels, but ineffectively; or they’re not advertising because of a knowledge gap or fear of failure. We’ll start with your organizational goals and outline a channel strategy, budget, and creative together.

Analytics

Not so sure about Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console? Confused by what you’re seeing in Facebook or LinkedIn ads? Wondering if your social media performance is any good? We’ll review analytics together and separate meaningful metrics that you and your leadership team should care about.

Who Is It For?

“We're a small team and we can't keep up with everything we're being asked to do.”

“I'm just not 100% confident that I'm making the right recommendations for our organization's digital marketing strategy.”

“I'm having trouble proving our marketing team's value and getting my leadership team to buy into digital marketing."”

“I just learned how to [fill-in-the-blank] and now it's changing again...”

Marketers Looking for a Thought Partner

One of my clients used the term "thought partner," and I thought it was so appropriate that I kept it. For marketers that feel like they don't have the guidance or resources internally to make confident decisions about strategy, budget, platforms, and tactics, a marketing coach can provide a much-needed sounding board along with experienced recommendations.

Marketers Looking for Leadership Buy-In

As marketers, it can be challenging to get buy-in from leadership teams and business owners. That's because leadership often views marketing as an expense, not an investment. Marketers need to learn how to present and prove digital marketing as a path to business growth, not just another line item in the budget.

Marketers that are Stuck

Put simply, your digital marketing isn't working. You're committing "random acts of marketing" and not seeing the results you're looking for, and you don't know what to do next.

Business Owners Developing their Marketing Team

Business owners are almost always juggling dozens of responsibilities at once and, let's face it, aren't the right person to own the marketing function in an organization. But when business owners are involved in the development of their team with the right coaching, strategies, and processes, organizations see significant long-term benefits.

What to Look for in a Digital Marketing Coach

These days we have a coach for everything: life coaches, nutrition coaches, career coaches — let’s face it, anyone can call themselves a coach and put themselves out there. So what should you be looking for in a digital marketing coach?

Real Experience

There's just no replacement for real-life experience working with real businesses in real situations. Just like the best teachers often bring years of industry experience, the same goes for the best digital marketing coaches.

Strategic Perspective

An effective digital marketing coach will have experience building a digital marketing strategy. Sounds obvious, but there's a big difference between connecting real business goals with digital strategy compared to just running a few social media marketing campaigns.

Industry Knowledge

A good digital marketing coach will help you deepen your understanding of your target audience. They'll also bring their own experience from other coaching clients and past industry experience. A marketing coach who has worked primarily with B2C clients may not necessarily be the best fit for a B2B organization (and vice versa), so be sure to inquire about specific industry and client experience.

Tactical Experience

While understanding strategic marketing is incredibly important, it's highly valuable for a digital marketing coach to have hands-on experience with modern marketing tactics and platforms as well. These could include search engine optimization (SEO), digital advertising, social media, email marketing, content marketing, Google Analytics, and more.

Who Am I?

I’m Ryan Morgan, a 15+ year digital marketing strategist, coach, and instructor.

Prior to founding swell Digital, I was the Director, Brand + Digital Strategy at ignite, a boutique brand and digital marketing agency serving mission-driven brands. Before that I was the Vice President, Digital Marketing at Aztek, one of Cleveland’s leading agencies for web design, development, and digital marketing.

Prior to my agency experience, I was the VP, Marketing & Digital at ERC, where I oversaw the organization’s marketing and digital strategy, as well as a team of high-performing marketers focused on design, email/automation, video, SEO, and content.

I’m the founder and instructor of The SEO Cohort, a cohort-based SEO training program for individuals.

And I’m also the author of the book, “Double Your Website Traffic: A Step-By-Step Blueprint Using Content, SEO, PPC, and Social Media,” which reached #1 best-seller status in multiple Amazon categories.