When What You Know, Isn’t Accurate

We’re living in the age of Know-it-allism. And why not?  Any person with access to the internet can literally find information on any topic known to man. We are only limited by how quickly we can consume that information.

At least that’s how some people look at it.  But there’s a difference between “knowing” something and experiencing it.  That’s especially true when what is “known” is built on a lot of subjective variables and viewpoints.

Tom Nichol’s book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters walks through a multitude of reasons that most people aren’t consuming reliable information. However, they take action on the information regardless of its validity. 

Digital marketers should be concerned with established knowledge for two reasons. 

The first is that we leverage the same social media and content publishing platforms that are so prevalent in assisting bad actors to disseminate unreliable information.  That means we have to keep our content compelling and accurate to credibly garner attention and build an engaged audience.

The second reason is that digital marketers need to critically review the content and best practices that they want to adopt for their marketing campaigns. There’s no shortage of people striving to establish themselves as a “thought leader” who will dole out advice just because they think it sounds right.

Speaking for myself, I must see dozens of affiliate or link-building “experts” on YouTube every day.  Each one claims to have the secret sauce to help me get rich . . . and quick.  For all I know, one of them might have a fool proof plan.  But I also know I’d have to wade through ninety-nine frauds before I found something legitimate.  And the legitimate one still might not work for me because of timing or my personal style.

Best practices always need to be reviewed for individual suitability. What doesn’t work well for one company or industry, might be a valuable strategy in another.  Think critically as you consume digital marketing ideas and participate in a social or online platforms that can set ignorance and inspiration on equal ground. It can be difficult to challenge our own digital marketing biases without having ill-advised outside influences guide us toward ineffective ideas.

Sometimes Simple Digital Marketing Analytics . . . Are Too Simple

Do you get overwhelmed by your digital marketing analytics?  Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches do.  There are a lot of channels to account for: email, social, SEO, SEM, referral links, etc. Trying to make sense of data from all the platforms that drive these channels can be daunting.  Trying to consolidate all the metrics into one tool like Google Analytics sounds ideal but can get very complicated and time consuming to implement and verify. 

This leads many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches to seek out simplified versions of the data through reports or dashboards.  While the motive is understandable, and even admirable, it requires a dedicated process of compiling the complicated data into a comprehensive and informative dashboard.  Anything less will oversimplify your data rather than clarify it.

Need an example of how oversimplification causes problems?   Recently a group of trainers were interested in how their personal social media posts compared to the posts to the company social media pages.  Compiling the data from the social media platforms data was going to take time and money that the trainers did not want to spend.

As a shortcut, the trainers requested monthly analytic data from their established marketing dashboard, Google Analytics, to get a high level view of their digital marketing efforts.  Since Google Analytics was set up to track traffic from social media and could be segmented to identify the source, the assumption was that it would be a solid data set to see what profiles were generating the best results, personal vs. company.  The data clearly showed that the company profiles were generating more traffic, about 3 clicks to one.

The decision was made that personal social media accounts were not generating as many clicks, so the trainers would scale back their activity on social media and invest their time elsewhere. A month later, leads had dropped by twenty percent.

What happened?  Oversimplifying the data meant that interactions on social media platform like comments or requests were overlooked.  Google Analytics was only compiling data from people that visited the site from social media links. It was completely ignoring any leads that were generated directly on the social media platform.

These lead sources were a rich channel of opportunity that suddenly was cut off because incomplete data was used to evaluate personal profiles. Upon re-instating personal profile activity and doing a more comprehensive review, we found that the trainer’s personal profile activity was producing slightly better results than the company profiles.

If you are going to evaluate an element in your digital marketing process, make sure you have a reliable and understandable data set to work with.  It’s almost impossible to get a comprehensive set of data from all your channels to account for all your marketing interactions. Be aware of your data’s blind spots and at least incorporate anecdotal for the channels where your data is not centralized. Simplifying complex sets of data is helpful to get digestible metrics. However, simplifying metrics often leads to oversimplifying the information which results in lazy and unproductive digital marketing decisions.

Review your Digital Marketing for Outdated Information

A company’s digital marketing assets can grow to a sizeable number of properties that are easy to lose track of.  That’s especially true for assets that are rarely used. It’s important to keep a list of your active digital marketing assets and review them periodically for content updates and administrative access.

Digital marketing assets that are commonly used, like the company website or social media channels, won’t be forgotten but should undergo a regular review and refresh process. That’s especially true if any company contact information or major shifts in products or services happen.

Ancillary assets that are not commonly used in digital marketing processes run a greater risk of not being updated or forgotten all together. Examples of these assets are search engine business listings or company profiles on association lists.

Google business listings are an important ancillary aspect that can be very problematic if forgotten.  Since business listings are often featured above a website listing, even if it’s well optimized for search, it can negate refreshed data from the site. It’s also becoming a common avenue for initial contact with a client or prospect.

A client recently asked us to review their search positions and we realized that they had an outdated google listing for a location that had since closed, and no listing for their other locations.  To make matters more confusing, the owner of the outdated account had moved on to a different company without transferring administrative rights to anyone at the company. 

This is a worst case scenario where information is almost completely wrong and ownership to correct it has been lost.  We were able to claim the business from Google but it took a solid two weeks before the profile was fully claimed and updated.

Keep a record of your digital marketing assets and administrative details. Changes to  your business, staff, and partners is inevitable and that record will serve as a checklist to make sure that your digital marketing assets aren’t left behind.

Set Your Digital Marketing Priorities

Getting spread too thin is a common way for digital marketing performance to plummet.  For most trainers, consultant, and professional coaches, it’s unrealistic to have a marketing presence in all channels for all people. It’s critical that digital marketers set a marketing priority hierarchy so that top producing activities aren’t left undone.

The width (and maybe the breadth) of the digital marketing discipline is expanding.  However, it’s not uncommon to find that time and money dedicated to digital marketing activities are not expanding with it.  This means that digital marketers often experience a bandwidth issue in trying to leverage their available resources to communicate effectively on their chosen channels. 

The beginning of the year is a great time to review your campaigns from the year before.  Analyze which activities were most effective and place those at the top of your priorities for this year.  The lower ranked activities might still be worth doing but if time or resources grow thin, those can be targeted for elimination or postponement rather than sacrificing a more productive activity.

Image Courtesy of HighTechDad

Digital Marketing Technology Might be Smart but it has No Common Sense

Digital marketing technology continues to get more refined from year to year.  Sophisticated algorithms and stream lined tools help digital marketers cover more channels than they ever could in the past.  However, the sheer bandwidth that digital marketing allows a marketer to take on, often prevents them from reviewing how smart the technology really is.  Unfortunately, when an analysis is undertaken, it’s not uncommon for digital marketers to find that digital marketing technology is really smart about delivering on its intended purpose, but applies its capabilities without any common sense.

It’s no secret that this is the busiest time of year for retailers.  Retail digital marketers do extensive planning to set channels, calendars, and targets that all get executed between Thanksgiving (or before) and Christmas.  It’s also the best time of year to witness digital marketing systems under stress tests as they deliver these aggressive marketing strategies.

Here are two examples of “smart” technology behaving densely.

Email Overload

Every year, I buy a sampler pack of cigars for a family member.  In the last several years, I’ve bought this gift from the same retailer.  Like any good smart technology system, my purchases and preferences were saved to my profile and undoubtedly assigned to a particular communication plan. 

My assumption is that purchasing sampler packs assigned me to several marketing profiles because the individual products in those packs were all likely tagged separately to populate the companies CMS.  The result was that I received five emails from this company in about an hour.  Two of the offers contradicted one another and none of the offers could be used in conjunction.   

The obvious lack of common sense is sending that many emails in such a short time frame.  But even the purchasing proposition was absurd. I would need to make four separate purchases with separate shipping costs within a day to take advantage of the Calls to Action.

Ads for What I just Bought

Search engines and social media platforms allow marketers to pay for ads that are specifically served to people that have past buying behavior or profile setting indicating they are interested in a particular product or service.  It’s a brilliant way to use general demographic information to narrow down to an individual who likely wants a particular offer rather than making the ad available to a general population where the majority of the audience has no interest. That is, until the ad system misses critical information like recent purchases. 

Every gift I’ve bought online has had ads served up to me for at least a week after buying it.  In some cases, even the retailer I bought from continues to serve up ads as they are using a third party system or don’t include purchased items as a filter for removing ads Consumable items might make sense to continue advertising but most of my items are toys purchased for my children, nieces, or nephews. A smart system that tries to sell an item to someone who just bought it shows a real lack of common sense.

These systems will continue to improve. In the case of purchase history, there are already platforms that are leveraging completed buying data to stop serving ads for a period of time until the person is likely to need to buy it again.  No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, digital marketers need to review the processes carefully to identify these bone-headed gaps.  Even if a digital marketer doesn’t have an immediate solution to the problem, simply being aware of it can help you factor in the cost and counter-measures for the systems lack of common sense.

Know Your Digital Marketing Metric Flow

Analytics are essential for making educated improvements to your digital marketing campaigns, but only if the data is reliable. As the number of digital marketing tools expands, so does the complexity of the data. Minimizing your tool set helps minimize the complexities that can cause problems but even a streamlined digital marketing platform should be mapped so that you know how your data is flowing.


Most digital marketers run a monthly report of their numbers and then drill into any anomalies. That’s a great cadence for review but one that can gradually pull you from making accurate conclusions if the data is incorrect.


As an example, digital marketing platforms or apps like Eventbrite are often used to set up landing pages for calls to action. It’s not uncommon for digital marketers to forget to integrate that data into their preferred analytics platform (like Google Analytics) or account for the built in data for those tools.


This can pose a big problem. In this example, the digital marketer might only see outbound links from the website as traffic and ignore social or email traffic. They might then compare that fractional amount of traffic to the conversions they’ve achieved from the page and decide that the landing page is having an outstanding performance. So they re-focus on generating more traffic to the landing page which might not actually be a problem to begin with rather than page conversion tests (which might also not be a problem).


The point is that missing pieces of your metric flow can cause digital marketers to work on the wrong problem, or a problem that doesn’t exist at all. Make sure you fully understand how your marketing tools are collecting data so that you can come to reasonable conclusions based on that full data set.

Video Content Without Elaborate Production Capabilities

Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have the speaking skills and personal presence to create compelling video content.  However, only the minority of them do.  Lacking technical capabilities prevents them from creating video at all or finds them producing lackluster quality material. But that doesn’t need to be the case.  A few video basics can provide a serviceable video that can fairly easily be molded into a professional quality marketing video.

Full video production is often a strain on time and budgets for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches.  “Do It Yourself” production eliminates the cost and lets you shoot video on your timetable. But that assumes that the video that you shoot is usable.

Video editing is a powerful tool that can take a lot of the burden of video production off the trainer, consultant, or professional coach. However, it’s not a cure all.  Here are a few strategies for getting the most out of video that you shoot.

  • Lighting – You don’t need professional lighting but it’s important not to shoot video in a dark area.  Find a well lit place in your office, conference room, or working station to shoot the video and it’s likely to be suitable for use.
  • Stability – Make sure the camera is stable.  A tripod is ideal but even a table or chairs can serve the purpose of steadying the camera.
  • Speak, Don’t Script – It’s a good idea to have an outline of what you want to say but trying to mock up a homemade teleprompter often comes off as rigid and lacking confidence.  You know your content and are speaking to an audience of none.  Deliver your content with the knowledge that any mistakes will be cut from the final version.
  • Stay Relaxed – Stage fright kicks in often for people when they look down the barrel of a camera.  Avoid this phenomenon by speaking to the person filming or a set spot in space if you are filming yourself. 
  • Repackage – Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches speak at professional events that video the presenters.  This is usually professionally produced and can often be trimmed into many smaller videos that deliver powerful content in small clips.

Video does not need to be as arduous a process as it might have been years ago.  Most of us are walking around with a professional quality camera in our pocket. Take advantage of your phone or video devices by following these steps and getting into a routine of video production that allows you to capture the material and then work with an editor to polish it to a final version.

Define Your Digital Marketing Niche Focus

The internet is a crowded place.  There are over 2 million blog posts every single day, let alone social media posts, podcasts, etc.   Even the best content can have a hard time standing out to a broad audience.  It’s often better to narrow your focus to a niche of the market to engage that audience specifically rather than trying to wade to the top of the content pile in general.

There are several different ways to target a niche. 

Type of Business

Do you have a target client that fits a specific kind of business?  Focus your content on that specific subset.  For example, we tend to work with B-to-B trainers, consultants, and professional coaches, so we create content that focuses on problems and tactics that small to mid-size firms encounter.

Industry

Is there a specific industry that you serve?  For instance, we often work with sales and leadership development training firms and will often use those industries as examples in our content.

Service

Can you narrow down what you are offering your audience? As the internet grows, it is difficult to be all things to even a specifically targeted group.  For instance we focus on email marketing, social media marketing, content creation, SEO, and web development so our content is almost always specific to tactics for one of these categories.

Defining your niche doesn’t mean you have to always keep within those categories but it’s best not to stray too far.  For instance, we provide video editing in certain cases where a client needs the service but doesn’t warrant having a dedicated provider. Just because it’s something that we provide here and there does not make it core service, so we don’t target video editing techniques in our digital marketing channels. 

It also doesn’t mean that other opportunities outside your target focus won’t be generated.  We work with several non-consultant firms and consultants for things other than sales and leadership that see the application of the same techniques in their business.

Building up an interested audience is critical to get the focus necessary to generate business opportunities.  That is much easier to do with a targeted message that speaks specifically to a certain demographic (your target clients) rather than trying to cover everything and hope the right people notice.

Making Efficient Design Decisions in Digital Marketing

A shortage of opinions in digital marketing is almost never a problem. That is especially true when dealing with design and layout. Making a case for a design being “right” is often not an objective process. Since the judgement call can come down to how someone or group of someone’s feel, separating informed suggestions from uninformed suggestions can be difficult.

There is an element of personal style to digital marketing. What works for one person or one business is not necessarily the right fit for another. So it’s important to be diligent on what you take inspiration from to ensure that it caters to an individual’s or company’s strengths.

When tackling design elements make sure that input on your design decisions are coming from as small a group as possible that includes only people experienced with your business, digital marketing, and/or design principles. Those who can’t do . . . give advice, and that can drastically hinder the impact of your digital marketing campaigns.

Knowledge Transfer for Digital Marketing

Turnover can be prevalent in digital marketing roles especially for trainers, consultants, or professional coaches that are running small firms. In the day-to-day hustle and bustle documenting those processes is rarely even on the radar.  However, a sudden departure can leave critical gaps in digital marketing processes that are either time consuming to recreate or impossible to recover.

Job tenures are not getting longer and that trend seems to show no signs of slowing down. That means that firms with a dedicated marketing employee or marketing partners can expect a departure about every four years on average. So it’s a good idea to diversify your digital marketing knowledge.

Lacking a knowledge transfer plan typically results in digital marketing taking a significant step backward. Years’ worth of improvement can disappear suddenly as an employee or partner departs.  Backfilling those processes often means starting from scratch or scrambling to make guesses on how campaigns were run and what is effective. That’s a recipe for rampant disorganization that will result in mistakes (old and new) and a loss of marketing effectiveness.

There’s a few strategies for accomplishing digital marketing knowledge diversification:

Have a bench

Having a more junior person(s) working on at least some of the digital marketing in conjunction with the primary marketing professional means that they can at least familiarize themselves with the processes.  A known departure becomes less daunting as there is a person on hand that doesn’t need to learn the processes from the ground up and can transition into the role.  A sudden departure means that processes won’t grind to a halt and that the more junior person can at least keep things limping along until they become more proficient.

Have a constant

Some firms have a dedicated marketing professional but work in conjunction with an external digital marketing service or provider.  This is often the case when a skill or technical gap is identified. However, it can serve as a secondary benefit in that the partner is likely familiar with at least some of the overarching processes and can help fill in with some additional processes until a dedicated replacement is identified.

Documentation

A well-documented process can serve as a manual to transition responsibilities but only if the document is thorough.  Often role documentation is done as an afterthought and the person creating the documentation has no tangible motivation to create it or keep it up to date.  If your strategy is to transfer knowledge via documentation, it’s imperative to have a defined process for keeping the documentation up to date.

Knowledge transfer typically only becomes a priority when a firm experiences a significant role loss.  Unfortunately options are very limited when a person is about to move on. Define your knowledge transfer plans so that your digital marketing doesn’t hit the road with a departing employee or partner.

Image Courtesy of pakorn / freedigitalphotos.net

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