Efficient digital marketers have a toolbox of systems and applications to publish their digital marketing campaigns. This toolbox might be a set of applications working together or an all–inclusive platform. No matter what type of setup you employ, change is constant in digital marketing and the technology that drives it.  That change usually improves capabilities and stability, but it also puts stress on your digital marketing processes.  No matter how simplified or refined your digital marketing process is, external updates will cause it to break and a regular review process is necessary to correct those interruptions when they occur.

To quickly identify breaks in your process it’s important to map out your digital marketing procedures.  Think of it as a chain.  The top of the chain is your primary marketing platform or set of platforms. The bottom of the chain is the deployment of individual communications on a particular channel. Problems at the top of the chain will cause the whole process to critically fail. Problems at the bottom of the chain will be isolated.

Critical failures are what digital marketers dread the most but there is a silver lining to a high level problem . . . it’s not going to be overlooked.  Critical failures obviously take priority because marketing activities typically grind to a halt when top of the chain systems fail.

The lower level breaks in the marketing process pose a unique problem, they are often overlooked.  While these less severe breaks won’t have immediate catastrophic effects as a high level problem, they can become a nagging detriment to your digital marketing’s overall effectiveness.

Here’s a simple break in the chain that we recently discovered on a process review:

 

Article Posted to Website

The blog post is set within a social media content manager

The SM content manager publishes to a set of LinkedIn accounts

The content is shared from LinkedIn to Twitter by two individuals

The content arrives into the Twitter feeds

 

On a content review it was discovered that images had stopped appearing on the Twitter posts.  Working backward we discovered that the image was available on every channel except Twitter. A recent Twitter update restricted the image from the blog section of the site from displaying when it was shared from LinkedIn.

So based on the break, the process had to be redefined.  Either the site template needed updated to meet Twitter’s requirements for sharing from LinkedIn, or the content needed published to Twitter in a way other than a LinkedIn share. We decided to go with the latter and publish to Twitter from the social media content manager. This resulted in a simpler solution that eliminated a step in the process.

This is a fairly simple example but even with a complex digital marketing process the prompt is based on an end point review.  Schedule recurring reviews of the endpoint of all your channels.  It doesn’t need to be a daunting effort but rather a quick health check.  Make a list of your channel end points like emails, social media pages, or landing pages and set a schedule to make sure they are still functioning as you’ve designed them.

I suggest a review at least once a quarter (our schedule is monthly). If you find something is out of place at the end of your marketing process, this review will let you backtrack and eliminate the break before it becomes a drag on your digital marketing effectiveness.