IN CLEAR FOCUS: This week’s guest, Corey Morris, the CEO of Voltage and author of “The Digital Marketing Success Plan,” discusses his START planning framework for effective digital marketing. Corey explains why strategy must precede tactics, the dangers of “checklist SEO,” and how to connect marketing metrics to business outcomes. He shares insights on AI’s impact on search marketing, the importance of brand foundation, and a case study where an investment of $80K generated $1.2M in revenue.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
Corey Morris: Checklists are great. Best practices are great. Having an organized way you approach your work is great. But you can be doing a lot of right things. But in the absence of a strategy, you can just be doing a lot of things for a long time and not see a return on that investment into that activity.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Search engine optimization, or SEO, has evolved dramatically since its early days of keyword stuffing and link building. Today, with the integration of artificial intelligence in search and growing pressure to demonstrate ROI, many marketers are caught between chasing tactical wins and developing sustainable strategies. While it’s tempting to follow a checklist approach to optimization, achieving meaningful business outcomes requires a more nuanced understanding of how search behavior, technology, and business strategy intersect. Our guest today is an expert in helping organizations develop and implement successful digital marketing strategies. Corey Morris is the owner and CEO of Voltage, a digital agency focused on search marketing and web development. In addition to leading Voltage, Corey is a VIP contributor to Search Engine Journal and a regular contributor to Search Engine Land and Forbes. Corey is also the author of “The Digital Marketing Success Plan – How to Avoid Poor Communication, Misaligned Expectation and Wasted Dollars.” Prior to acquiring Voltage in 2022, Corey spent nearly two decades in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands through ROI-generating digital strategies. To discuss digital marketing, the evolution of search, and the impact of AI, I’m delighted that Corey is joining us today from Kansas City, Missouri. Corey, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Corey Morris: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Adrian Tennant: Well, let’s start with your journey. You acquired Voltage in 2022 after working there for several years in leadership roles. Corey, what inspired you to make the transition from employee to owner? And what have been some of your key learnings?
Corey Morris: I’ve worked in a few great agencies all within a triangle here in the middle of Kansas City, but something just really clicked here at Voltage early on. I got to come in and start their digital marketing team and really a new function 12, 13 years ago now. And over time and just working closely with the owners at the time and then the sole owner in the later phases and being also surrounded by other agency leaders and owners through Agency Management Institute and a mastermind group I was in, really had some of that entrepreneurial spirit in me. Going back even to high school where I took entrepreneurship classes kind of bubble up. And so being able to harness some of that and seek out the opportunity at that phase of my career to figure out what’s next was a great opportunity for me. In terms of why, you know, acquiring Voltage versus starting something on my own, Like I said, things really just clicked here. I was doing everything from new business to a lot of operations and strategy. And so in many ways, aside from literally just being the owner, I had done most of the roles and jobs here. And so that appealed to me to continue building what we had built collectively and continue carrying that forward.
Adrian Tennant: Under your leadership, Voltage has evolved from a creative shop to focusing specifically on search and web development. What drove your decision to specialize?
Corey Morris: Yeah, that actually wasn’t really the easiest thing to do or navigate. Thankfully, I had some great resources, great coaches and advisors to help me through that. But what I realized over the past several years is that when we were a kind of medium-sized agency trying to do everything for everyone, we were still spread thin. We would lose out to a specialty agency who was really deep in some type of subject matter expertise. Or we would have to, you know, if I had one email marketing and automation person, they’d have to know 11 different platforms, or one or two copywriters would have to know 80 different clients across dozens of industries. And so I had people on islands, we were spread really thin. And while we weren’t doing a bad job in some categories and areas of what we were doing, we weren’t necessarily selling it all equally or leading with certain things. And so there were areas where there were inefficiencies or not enough work in areas where we were slammed and they all had to kind of subsidize each other. And so a lot of those things from the operational standpoint, the positioning standpoint, and the level of expertise where we could fairly and rightfully compete with anybody in North America on one level, or just be more of a commodity or perceived as a commodity on another level and a different channel really created some challenges. So I actually resisted leaning into search early on and I thought we needed to do more things to grow and scale and we did for a couple of different iterations of how we grew. But, you know, I finally was in a room at a workshop with colleagues and they’re like, well, you’re known as the SEO guy in this room. Why would you resist that? I’m like, I resisted that because I thought we needed to grow in a different way. And so leaning into that has allowed us to be a specialist and not a generalist and to turn kind of the ship and navigate that direction.
Adrian Tennant: Reflecting your expertise in digital marketing, you’ve written a book called “The Digital Marketing Success Plan.” Now, in the book, you introduce the START planning framework. Why did you feel compelled to develop this systematic approach to digital marketing planning?
Corey Morris: Yeah, I actually started down the path of thinking about things from a much more conceptual area or arena when I was thinking about the content for the book. And then I realized that’s really just like one chapter of why this matters and to make it valuable, it needs to be actionable and tactical. And so as I started backing out from a lot of the different conversations I have with prospects and clients about why have people given up on search or digital marketing channels or think that it doesn’t work or why are you jaded about it or why are you skeptical about it or why do you think you should be doing it there’s a lot of different angles and reasons that factored into what inspired me to. Essentially take what was a really complicated and hard to explain process that my team went through to develop strategies and plans for clients on the front end of any engagement, and make it an approachable framework that anybody can use across any different industry focused on digital marketing. It leans a little bit heavier into lead generation, but it works for e-commerce as well, or even nonprofits with other different types of goals. But really the focus of it is to be able to articulate it, get it down to a five-step process that you can get in and out of in 60 to 90 days. and be able to be on your way with predictable plans and tactics that you have conviction in what you’re doing and why instead of just doing something because it’s best practices or checklist or somebody said this is the one magic thing you should do or you inherited a set of plans or tactics and to really understand and own that process all the way through.
Adrian Tennant: Corey, could you walk us through the START planning framework?
Corey Morris: Yeah, so there’s five steps, as I mentioned, and start is an acronym. So the first step in that process is strategy. And that has to be the very first step in many things that you do in work or life. But unfortunately, we skip to tactics in many cases, because it’s easier to just start doing something than to have the patience or say timeout, we should stop and plan it out and understand what our objective is. But the strategy phase starts with getting stakeholders in a room or on a Zoom and understanding what the ultimate goal is for each of them when it comes to digital marketing. In some industries, we’re speaking our own custom language and have our vocabulary. But even in some of those cases, the same words mean different things to different people based on their job function or their role or their team. So getting on the same page about what our goals are, what we want to accomplish, linking marketing metrics and KPIs to business outcomes and understanding what the ultimate ROI or impact that marketing can have on the business or organization is your starting point. So getting a well-defined strategy with goals in place that anyone in that stakeholder group can articulate, even beyond people who are in digital marketing roles, is key and that carries through the other steps and that’s the lens that we look through as we come back to. When you got that in place then we move into tactics and that’s where we want to challenge, assumptions about any tactics, the things we’ve been doing just because we’ve been doing them, even the things that are working well, that we want to challenge where we could go deeper, take them further, as well as look at other platforms, other channels. And this is a phase where it’s cheap to research and to reach our target audience and where we can move toward those goals that we define in the strategy. And once we have a set of tactics that we feel is solidified, then we can move into the next three phases, which start to flow a lot faster, which are application. And that is looking at the assets we need. What do we need to reach this audience with these tactics, to support these tactics against our strategy? In terms of landing pages or the website as a whole or assets for content or even ads that we don’t have and get that inventory listed out and a plan for how we’re going to build those out. So we don’t get to the end of the plan. We’re like, we’re ready to go. And then, oh, yeah, we got to go create all this stuff that we forgot about. The R is for review. And so I didn’t call it reporting. I went with a bigger term because this is more than just turning on an out-of-the-box third-party dashboard or connecting GA4, which does a lot of things that we wish it didn’t. And it leaves out a lot of things we wish it had. But this is getting things configured in a way that you can measure ROI and link up and go deeper toward those business metrics and impacts and understanding what the full picture is, not just a return on ad spend or clicks and impressions, but really mapping out KPIs to business outcomes and having a plan for tracking and measuring that. And then the final T is transformation. And that’s where this whole plan comes together. This is where you map out the resources that are needed. You have your tactics on a timeline. You have that nice balance of built-in testing, opportunities and times where you’re going to use agility to revisit your plan and make decisions on the fly, but also have as much of the timeline mapped out as you can. So you can stay disciplined on implementing and it’s not this nice, lovely exercise that you went through. And then you put it on the shelf two months in when things get busy or you get distracted by other things happening.
Adrian Tennant: Love the strategy-first approach. Well, your book emphasizes the importance of having certain prerequisites in place before beginning strategic planning, specifically around brand, product, audience and sales processes. Corey, why are these foundational elements so crucial for digital marketing success?
Corey Morris: Yeah. Some of the things that happen if you get too far into the process include not being able to answer critical questions. You’re going to know early on in that strategy phase, if no one can answer the question, well, how many leads do we need? Or what messaging do we have? Or when you get to the asset base, when you’re in the application phase of like, what do we have to pull from? And so any of those steps will have challenges if we don’t have a brand strategy and direction that sets us apart, that’s definitive and enough of roadmap to operate off of. If our product development roadmap is confusing or doesn’t allow us to differentiate in content from us versus a competitor, or even the customer service or sales components, if we’re not aligned, then we get into some of the classic conflicts between sales and marketing and some of the challenges that happen in measurement and qualifying leads and agreement on that too. So what happens just if one platform, for example, if we’re paying to have Google ads and to be in that top spot and we get people to our landing page and leads keep coming through, but we’re getting beat up on price. Well, chances are we lacked something somewhere along the way and brand strategy or product development or sales messaging. To not differentiate ourselves enough from our competitors in terms of what our offering is and how it’s different. So unless we’re the low-price leader, we don’t wanna be competing on price or for that to be the key objection or reason here that somebody brings up. And typically that’s a symptom of us not having woven in enough of that brand story or strategy along the way. And hopefully by going through the start process, we’ve identified that early and didn’t just go give six months of Google Ads budget to Google to find that out in a much more expensive way.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Corey Morris, CEO of Voltage and author of “The Digital Marketing Success Plan.” Corey, in recent articles you’ve written about the dangers of what you’ve dubbed “checklist SEO.” So, could you explain what you mean by that and why it’s problematic?
Corey Morris: Yeah. And so I appreciate that question. I want to be clear that checklists and plans and tactical plans and schedules and strategies are good, right? If they’re intentional and have strategy woven into them. But unfortunately, often I find that in different marketing channels or even just more broadly across digital marketing, that people are just doing activities or doing tactics. And so I had a recent client that we brought on. I went through the strategy process with them and learned that they had inherited an agency relationship where they were just getting a few blog posts a month and a handful of social media posts a week with no real context for the what and why or the goals around that. It felt like it was just something you should do because it’s a best practice or somebody said you should do it. And another story would be a client who came to us and each month they’re talking with their agency who’s managing paid search ads. And they keep coming up with ideas for new keywords. And they’d ask the agency, hey, how about this keyboard? Have you thought of that? The agency representative would say, yeah, it’s a good idea. I’ll add that. And we’ll see how that goes. That seems like a backwards relationship to be where the client’s driving strategy or ideas versus what’s happening there. And it feels like that more transactional checklist approach. Checklists are great, best practices are great, having an organized way you approach your work is great, but you can be doing a lot of right things, but in the absence of a strategy or specific goals or conviction behind it, you can just be doing a lot of things for a long time and not see a return on that investment into that activity.
Adrian Tennant: I’ve heard you say that marketing metrics looking great in a dashboard doesn’t necessarily translate to moving a client’s business forward. So how do you ensure that digital marketing activities align with actual business outcomes?
Corey Morris: Yeah, sometimes this is the most uncomfortable area for a digital marketer or a channel specific marketer to get into, right? I want to be maybe a nerd of deep expertise in SEO, for example. There’s too much for me to master an SEO, to then go in and have some political battles with a client or help my counterparts on the client side or brand side navigate some of the challenges. And whether it’s a small organization or a big one on the client side, it can be messy. There can be silos, there can be territory that you’re wading into, and now you’re acting more as a business advisor than you are an SEO, and that’s not necessarily comfortable to navigate into. But at the same time, I’ve, as an agency, have been fired when all the metrics look great in cases where someone can’t connect the dots to the business outcome. So it’s easy to say, well, that’s a big line item and I can’t tell that it’s working. So it’s the first thing that has to go and something else, you know, budget cuts come around or we’re looking at where we’re spending money. Or I don’t know on the client side, I can’t solve this problem. I don’t know how to solve it of attribution. So I’m just going to stop marketing until I can figure that out. And so in many cases, being willing to get a little bit messy and your hands dirty and go across that line and asking some of the questions and using some tools and frameworks to help make it productive and not personal is key. And so it’s not always fun. People sometimes get territorial who have been doing something the same way for 10 years and now you’re getting into their business. But great organizations understand that we’re all on the same team here and shining a light on some things helps us all not be surprised down the road.
Adrian Tennant: How has the emergence of artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT impacted search marketing?
Corey Morris: Yeah, so there’s definitely, you know, AI being two letters and one word essentially being so disruptive across so many industries. But in search specifically, we see people like me using ChatGPT daily as a tool to bring ideas, to help curate, create content, do things more efficiently. and agents and all the buzzwords and all the things people are doing and people are doing incredibly smart things. I’ve done some really cool things. And then I also get really frustrated. Like I was last night where it was lying to me and I’m pushing through that, but that’s one level, right? Of how we can leverage it and use it or other alternative LLMs, but search giants like Google. Have used machine learning in their own version for a long time in their algorithms and then brought it obviously front and center with AI overviews. And third-party software is often leveraging AI. So there are all these different levels of how we look at AI and how people define AI or think they’re using it or aren’t or don’t realize it’s now embedded in so many day-to-day things. What’s really interesting is that I go back to one of the points where this is really hammered home for me was in 2019 so pre AI emergence pre covid even. Rand Fishkin at an event I was at in Portland was already sharing data about the drop-in click-throughs from Google. And so some of the zero-click search trend was already happening back then. And it’s been accelerated a bit. So the good news for me, for someone who’s deep in the subject matter, and my team who’s deep in it too, is this diversifies the sources and areas and places that traffic can come from. Some companies can’t handle this disruption or don’t want to have it and may be left behind using old tactics. And others will probably emerge and try to further disrupt the SEO industry, if you will. Whether it’s still called SEO in three years or not, maybe this is the time it finally dies. It’s been declared dead so many times and has evolved, so whether it evolves or not, or we have a new term of how we’re optimizing for AI and some of the legacy search engine functions of what they look like in the next three years, regardless, being found will not be a problem that goes away for any brand or a company. So you want to be found by your target audience. That’s actually tied back to the conceptual theme that I had when I started down the path for my book, but it was too high in the sky and not actionable. But being found will get harder. It won’t get easier. So by being able to leverage where we’re going while not going so fast that you forget about where a lot of your traffic comes from today will be a balancing act and important for the rest of this year as well as the years to come as we evolve.
Adrian Tennant: Corey, you lead an AI task force at Voltage. Could you tell us about that initiative and how it’s shaping your agency’s approach?
Corey Morris: It’s hard actually to keep it as organized as I want. We were meeting bi-weekly, we have a Slack channel, but there are just so many things that people across different teams are testing here. And when I think I backed my way into it, seeing how much we were paying for different software and different seats and applications, I’m like, we got to get this together and share what we’re learning individually, look at how we can tackle problems internally and for clients, and to make sure that we’re all on the same page here. So we have any time a new challenge comes up that challenges scaling or efficiency or ideation, naturally, as individuals in my organization, we’re often going to AI to see if there’s a way to do it smarter, not harder. But as a team, when we look at the future of where we’re going, being able to come together and talk and share what we’re learning, what we’ve learned and be able to share with each other and not let any individual fall behind is critical as well.
Adrian Tennant: Well, as regular listeners know, we love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So Corey, could you share an example of how your approach using the START framework has helped a client achieve better results?
Corey Morris: Yeah, it’s been a journey and what I realized and one of the probably the key stories in my book that I get into with a client before it was called the digital marketing success plan and the START planning process was a third party logistics firm we were working with. So global and reach offices all over the world and based here in North America. They had all of the things I’ve talked about in terms of challenges. They were just sending out email newsletters, not knowing the what and why they were spending some money in Google ads, but not really having an ROI expectation on it. They were creating a ton of content and thought leadership, but not really connected to any goals or opportunities to make sure it’s reaching the right audience. So when we came in, this process didn’t take the 60 to 90 days like it does now to get the plan in place. It was really over a year or so that we accidentally kind of got into different categories. We found out that sales and marketing did not talk. Sales didn’t use the CRM. Leads weren’t going from marketing into the CRM. Nobody owned the CRM. So my team actually got into their dynamics installation and took ownership over it, working with legal and compliance to make sure we weren’t breaking anything and breaking any rules but, working through that to be able to get attribution right. So we didn’t go through it in the START order. We started with the review phase. We ended up backing our way into some goals and getting alignment. But when we finally got to a good place, we were able to document a plan and go from zero attribution, a whole bunch of activities to ultimately getting them to a point where things were planned out, it was operating like a machine and had nice quarterly touchpoints to revisit, had a lot of testing ground for different tactics as well. And on an $80,000 a year investment in marketing externally and counting some ad spend, they were booking over 1.2 million in revenue with more open revenue in their pipeline. And so that was a huge case study in terms of ROI and a holy grail to get to, to be able to tell that story, that no one on the inside and no one even on the outside could come in and get this thing turned around right away. And that was a huge key to when I look back at how we developed our framework, getting all those things that can take a lot of time or never get figured out into a shorter period of time in an organized manner.
Adrian Tennant: Well, you just mentioned attribution. So for brand marketers who may be struggling with proving ROI from their digital marketing investments, what guidance would you offer?
Corey Morris: I’ve actually got an upcoming article for one of the search engine publications I write for on connecting the dots between like search and digital marketers who are bottom of the funnel in branding. After having several conversations with colleagues who own and run branding agencies last year, and really connecting that to the point I made earlier about if you don’t have a solid brand strategy, what do I get when I’m down here at the bottom of the funnel and I need to create an ad or a landing page or content? I have really thin content that doesn’t work well in a search engine, or if I do get somebody to convert, we have that same problem of, okay, well, maybe we’re competing on price or we’re commoditized or we didn’t differentiate. So having enough throughputs and lines through that brand strategy to where it ends up in the wild is important. And that’s not easy or necessarily comfortable from a branding perspective when somebody comes in and has crazy ROI expectations. The strategy side of the brain person from the client or from the business comes in and is hammering on the brand people, or vice versa. The brand people are hammering on that person who just wants to live at the bottom of the funnel. But understanding some of those themes of why and how we need each other help draw that line. And now it might be a very zigzag line. It might take six to nine months for some of those brand elements to trickle all the way through that customer journey or that funnel in long sales cycles. But it’s definitely important. And it’s not just a one step we go attribute the color palette change or the brand identity refresh to it being this immediate lift at the other end of the spectrum. So having a well-defined funnel and understanding how all the parts and pieces support each other is a healthy place for organizations to be in their marketing department. And if brand and channel marketing are too far apart or have silos between them, You can’t get that type of alignment.
Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. Corey, if listeners would like to learn more about your work at Voltage or your book, “The Digital Marketing Success Plan,” what’s the best way to do so?
Corey Morris: Yeah, so there are a couple of great places. “Digital Marketing Success Plan” is a long title, so I’ve got a shorter domain name. It’s the DMSP.com. Head there. I’ve got some great new resources coming out, but unpacks the framework and has a link over to Amazon if you’re interested in checking out the book. And on the more guided path or the done-for-you version, Voltage offers that, so that’s just voltage.digital to find us there.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Corey, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Corey Morris: Thank you for having me.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Corey Morris, CEO of Voltage and author of “The Digital Marketing Success Plan.” As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: The Importance of Strategy in Marketing
00:22: Introduction to IN CLEAR FOCUS
00:44: The Evolution of SEO
01:26: Guest Introduction: Corey Morris
02:07: Corey’s Journey to Agency Ownership
04:02: Specialization in Search Marketing
04:15: The START Planning Framework
06:31: Overview of the START Framework
12:04: Foundational Elements for Success
14:18: The Dangers of Checklist SEO
17:38: Aligning Marketing Activities with Business Outcomes
19:52: Impact of AI on Search Marketing
22:54: Voltage’s AI Task Force
24:10: Case Study: A Client Success Story
26:36: Guidance on Proving ROI
28:45: Resources and Further Learning
