Don’t Be Stagnant: Ways to Keep Your Digital Initiatives Moving in the Right Direction

Being relevant in digital marketing means deliberately developing content and strategies around consumer behavior and attributes.

Sounds simple, right? Wrong. It’s a painful proposition for many organizations. Why? One static message may need to be replaced by multiple variations. Quickly emerging technologies and new practices create confusion and resistance. And as everyone knows, ingrained organizational habits simply die hard.

Here are four tips to keep your digital marketing initiatives on the right track.

Know the Organization and Culture
Legacy department and resource alignments sometimes can’t support new ideas—and this leads to stagnation.

A resource alignment that contains silos significantly impacts an organization’s ability to extend relevance across channels efficiently. If legacy resource alignments are the first stumbling block, this is the first place to troubleshoot.

And remember, incentives are equally important. The bar needs to be set higher for your people, and reaching new goals calls for new ways of motivating staff.

Investigate the Technology
Historically the technology platform/provider landscape has been fragmented. The content and data gymnastics required to deploy a relevant and customer-focused campaign across channels can be daunting.

Technology consolidation is happening. More providers are offering solutions in complementary channels while some providers take a holistic approach. Investigate the options. Efficiencies are gained through consolidation of the systems that define, develop and deploy digital communications.

Take an Incremental Approach
The desire to want to boil the ocean is very tempting. But, trying to do everything at once stunts progress.

A healthy regimen of incremental, organic optimization is a better way to go. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and grabbing the low hanging fruit is a great way to learn new practices, which can be applied later to bigger challenges.

Unsure of a segmentation strategy? Start with simple opportunities. Is it possible to segment the audience by customers vs. prospects? Male vs. female? Taking a single audience and establishing two elementary segments core to the business approach is a great starting point. Tailor and deploy content relevant to these two constituencies and ‘bank’ that knowledge (and revenue) for deeper layers of segmentation later.

Have a Plan
Having a plan provides single point of accountability and consensus that a team needs.

A good plan is a guide and benchmark that plots the steps, when to take them, and how the outcomes are measured. The plan should allocate resources to tasks and plot timelines for campaign development, deployment, and crucial back-end analysis. Without a plan, and the associated benchmarks, it is difficult to evaluate success, failure and learning.

Bryce Marshall ([email protected]) is the director of strategic services for Knotice.