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

Is Hootsuite’s Link Preview Deceiving You?

Hootsuite is a powerful social media marketing tool and makes running and monitoring social campaigns significantly more manageable.  However, like other third party social media management tools, Hootsuite is at the mercy of the social networks it’s posting to. It must constantly adjust to function within the social media platform’s rules and development options.  Just because a post appears accurately in Hootsuite does not mean that it will display the same way when posted to social networks.

Hootsuite is actually one of the better tools for including warnings that content might not appear the same as previewed or if they encounter a publishing outage.  However, these warnings are easy to overlook for new users unfamiliar with the terms or digital marketers that are trying to set up posts as quickly as possible.

Recently a client ran into an issue where images set in Hootsuite were accurately displaying in LinkedIn but were different or missing in Facebook and Twitter.  It turned out that a subtle warning was being overlooked.

Here’s what Hootsuite was displaying:

The two samples look exactly the same, but when posted the Facebook content had a different image from the webpage rather than the desired article image.  That’s because the small warning in yellow under the Facebook preview was being overlooked.

Hootsuite allows users to customize a link preview by changing the text or image.  However, many social media platforms only accept those customizations if the domain of the link has been verified.  Other platform don’t accept link customizations at all.  While LinkedIn posts looked accurate, the domain was not verified with Facebook so it was disregarding the link customizations. Twitter was not accept link customization at all.

This is an example of how easy it is to overlook potential problems in Hootsuite.  The dashboards are well laid out but warnings can be missed if they are nested within settings or editing panels, as this one is.  There are actually two warnings about link preview customization that were missed in this case.

In this particular case, verifying the domain was going to be problematic so both Facebook and Twitter posts will include an image only, which both platforms support, rather than a link preview.

It’s important to review your posts on the social networks directly to ensure your content is displaying as you expect.  If it is not, it’s a good idea to take a close look at some of the smaller print in Hootsuite.  Chances are there is a warning and instructions on how to correct the problem.

Digital Advertising: Know Your Goal

Paid advertising via social media or search engines can be a valuable channel for your digital marketing initiatives.  But the nature of paid adds is that it requires a defined budget and for that budget to be actively managed to optimize the return on investment.  It’s critically important to have a clearly defined goal for your paid advertising so that you can leverage your budget specifically to that purpose.

There tend to be two kinds of digital marketers when it comes to using paid advertising budgets:

  1. Those that want to spend as little as possible to meet a set target.
  2. Those that want to use a pre-defined budget to get maximum return.

Both of these strategies can lead to valuable results, but both can also be undone by a lack of focus.

Losing sight of an advertising goals seems absurd but it is surprisingly common.  A general assumption that I hear is that lack of focus on a goal can only stem from absentmindedness.  If that were the case, it would be far less common.  Unfortunately, the catalyst is often a result of incorporating new tools or external suggestions.

As an example, several of our clients attended a conference that discussed LinkedIn’s new interest targeting in their ad platform.  Every single one of them took away from the conference that they should include this new targeting tool because the speaker outlined how powerful segmented messages could be and potential results.  The assumption was that adding the interest targeting to existing ads would make them better.  More is better after all, right?

Unfortunately for several of the clients, the answer was no.  Adding the interest targeting on top of their demographic requirements shrunk the target group to such a small sample size that goals couldn’t possibly be met.  The intention was improved segmentation and targeting to get more responses but it neglected the goal of getting a certain number of people to view and fulfill the offer.

After analyzing why conversions plummeted and almost none of the digital advertising budget was used, we found the targeting change.  We then restructured the campaign into two unique campaigns, one set of ads defined by interest targeting and a second defined by demographic criteria so that the target audience remained sufficient.

Always have your goals in mind when making changes to your digital ad campaigns.  Sometimes updates that seem like improvements can run counter to you objectives.

Allow Extra Time for Downstream Marketing Channels

Setting a realistic calendar for digital marketing promotion is always a concern.  Most digital marketers have a handle on the necessary time frames for the marketing channels they own directly. However, it’s fairly common that digital marketers need to interface with partners, affiliates, or advertisers for specific campaigns but accounting for these external marketing channels’ own timeframes is often overlooked.

Wider or more intensive promotion with partners means that a more complex digital marketing plan that integrates downstream partner calendars is required.

Building a digital marketing calendar is naturally self-centric as marketers have direct control over the communication channels.  Working with partners requires a shift in attitude to be less self-centered and work within the confines of other’s promotion calendars.  There’s one simple solution for doing that, allow for additional time and give advance notice on how you hope to partner on the digital marketing initiative.

I saw a recent example with a company that wanted to launch a research survey.  The plan was to announce the survey on their digital marketing channels, make it live for a month, and then compile the results into an industry report.  People that responded to the survey got a customized report based on their self-identified demographics.

As a standalone promotion plan that makes a lot of sense.  However, the company had an extensive partner network that they also wanted to promote the survey.  The problem was that they failed to alert the partners to the initiative or provide relevant resources until the day the initiative launched.  So the partners were left with three options:

  1. Scramble to integrate the offer into their pre-existing digital marketing calendars for the immediate 30 days.
  2. Do some simple promotions as an add-on to pre-planned communications.
  3. Skip the promotion entirely.

Almost none chose the first option as there was insufficient time or because thoroughly adding the offer would disrupt their pre-planned calendar. So, at best, the offer was included in partner communications as a haphazard add-on to an email or hastily crafted social media post.

Engaging partners in your digital marketing promotion is a powerful tool that can exponentially improve your reach.  But digital marketers need to allow additional time to inform partners that will be promoting it further downstream.  Failing to do so appears as procrastination to the downstream partners.  Those digital marketers are unlikely to make procrastinator’s initiatives a priority when they weren’t consulted or forewarned about the plan.

Image courtesy of  SurasakiStock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Where Does Your Business Digital Footprint Lead?

The last post was on the importance of keeping your website well maintained. Once a repeatable schedule is set for maintaining the website, it should be expanded to maintaining your company’s digital footprint. A business digital footprint is all the content that you place on the internet about your company.  It’s referred to as a footprint because it’s a sign of where you’ve been and forms an online trail of sorts to your business. Failing to maintain that digital footprint will often result in people wandering off on unintended paths that do not lead them to your business.

So how can you beat a clear path across all your channels so that people will reliably find what they need from you?  It’s actually not complicated at all, just a consistent process of review and repair. The difficult aspect of the process is diligently organizing all that content to ensure it is consistently updated.

Your digital footprint can typically be split into three categories.

Directory

Many online directories have an automated process for crawling the internet and updating listings.  That’s one reason that keeping information on your website current is important as it will feed updates and corrections to other channels. 

But there are some important directories that rely on the owner proactively updating information. An important example of that is Google My Business.  I’m surprised at how frequently I find a company’s contact info or address is incorrect on their Google listing.  That’s usually a result of a move but the company either doesn’t know who to contact to update the listing or let it slip their mind completely.

Keep in mind that the listing appears for any user that searches their business directly on Google and this important digital channel is still sometimes neglected. 

Ads

Search engine or social media ads sometimes get the “set it and forget it” treatment.  Over time that becomes a disastrous scenario where a company is paying for ads that are either irrelevant or don’t lead users to a valid call to action.

If there is any time sensitivity to your ads, set an expiration for the campaign as soon as it gets implemented.  Ongoing ads should be regularly reviewed to make sure they are productive and relevant.

Social

Company profiles are becoming increasingly important as social media information is shared across directories and search engines.  Make sure that any contact information or company logistic changes get reflected in profiles across your social media channels.

Don’t misconstrue digital footprint maintenance with a censoring campaign. Often times trainers, consultants, or professional coaches focus on eliminating negative comments or references left by others. Digital footprint maintenance is a process of insuring YOUR content is accurate, not screening or filtering other people’s opinions.  

Your digital footprint should help people quickly find your company, products, or services. Consistency is paramount in this process.  No information does less damage than conflicting information. Keep an organized list of all your digital channels and systematically update all those channels when changes arise or content becomes outdated.

Building a Digital Marketing Playbook

It’s the time of year when goal setting is top of mind for most people.  Unfortunately, it’s more common than not for people to make resolutions and quickly disregard them or revert back to bad habits.  Last year we posted about the importance of setting a plan. Obviously a goal needs a plan to achieve it.  But as Mike Tyson famously put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” It’s not enough to just have a plan, it needs to be broken down into actionable behaviors.

One common strategy is to build a content calendar and use that as a plan.  There are three problems with using a calendar as a plan:

The best way to set behaviors designed to meet your goals is to build a playbook.  Just like a football playbook, these are the predesigned activities that you are going to run to meet a set goal.  That playbook will be derived from your marketing plans which should be set from your goals.

Here’s an example:

A training firm wants to generate 20% more leads to meet a set revenue goal from marketing.  The 20% increase would be determined from past metrics on closing/conversion percentage on leads and average revenue per deal.

The firm has established that they want 5% of the additional leads to come from social media.  Using the past conversion ratio of social media user to lead, they find that they need to pull 10% more activity from the social accounts.

To meet that 10% increase, the playbook for that particular channel includes two extra posts a week for CTA’s and a monthly video post that has historically converted at a higher percentage. 

This example shows how working backwards from the goal leads to a plan, like which channels will be in your digital marketing matrix.  Then the plan needs to be broken down into a playbook to assign specific behaviors to meet stated goals.  Of course, a full playbook would include behaviors for every channel that would add up to the stated goal.

It’s important to verify most of your playbook with historical data to avoid assigning unrealistic results to intended behaviors.  As you move into the year, a playbook is easier to review than a plan or calendar because it can be benchmarked against expected results.  If you find that the playbook is not generating the expected results or priorities change through the year, it’s easier to adjust the specific activities to meet those new realities.

A digital marketing plan is good but runs a high risk of becoming irrelevant as the year goes on.  Setting a playbook will give you a set list of activities to execute on the plan.  It will also provide flexibility when changes and problems inevitably impact the pre-set strategies.

Are LinkedIn Groups Still Relevant?

LinkedIn company pages seem to be constantly improving.  Since this post last year, company pages have gotten even better with seamless tools for sharing from personal profiles and content administration.  Groups on the other hand have been largely sidelined, both in updates and in the platforms navigation.  LinkedIn recently provided an update for groups but in many cases the improvement actually makes groups more irrelevant rather than re-defining their purpose.

LinkedIn group usage has been in decline since 2015.  While this article points to many potential causes for that, my thoughts are that the primary detractor from group pages is that the improvement to company pages made groups largely redundant.

Before the company pages were so well defined, groups were often the best platform to deliver company content to a client or prospect base.  As the company pages administrative and user experiences improved, there was less and less need to use groups as company communication platforms.  As content and interaction moved to company pages, many company-centric group pages drastically reduced content and interaction resulting in them becoming ghost towns.

So a revamp sounds like a good opportunity for digital marketers to reinvigorate a languishing group page right?  In some cases that might be true, but for lingering company-centric group pages it seems like this might be the death knell.

The revamped groups add many useful features but most of those are rehashed tools that already exist for company pages.  If group pages are losing ground because company pages have improved, making them more alike actually makes groups more irrelevant.

So is it time for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches to pull the plug on their LinkedIn group page?  If you have been duplicating content on your company page, then probably yes.  But if your group is focused on a specific topic or shared interest, then it might be a good time to reinvigorate it.

For example, if a sales training company is placing announcements and offers that already exist on their company page or could be easily transitioned there, then the group isn’t really serving a unique purpose.  In that case make a post that the group is going to be discontinued and redirect the group members to follow the company page.

However, if a sales training company has a group page for sales professionals in their city that features tactics and local events, that group would be well suited to use the new updates.  The sales trainers can continue to share their tactics but also collect events from the members and interact with the user base on professional development opportunities.

Company pages and group pages are overlapping more than they ever have.  If you can’t clearly define different purposes between your company and group page, and have supporting content to illustrate those stated differences, it might be a good time to let the group page lapse.

Systematic Digital Marketing Platform Migration

The need to move digital marketing platforms for social media, email, and/or your website is becoming more common as tools evolve and develop.  The change might be necessitated by external factors, like one platform acquiring another. Or it could be internal factors driving  change like finding more appropriate platform pricing or services.  Many trainers, consultants, or professional coaches procrastinate on making these changes for fear that it will be an arduous undertaking. If you focus on the principles of the digital marketing platform rather than the individual tool, it helps to simplify the requirements and make a migration much less daunting.

There are five basic components that can make up a digital marketing platform:

1. Audience

Contact lists can be time consuming for a system to export if they are large but it doesn’t need to be cumbersome for the digital marketer. If you export all your data to a spreadsheet file, it’s typically a simple process to set up matching categories on the new platform and import it so that you have a direct conversion.

2. Communications

Email/Communication templates can be challenging to migrate if you are relying on system generated layouts. However, most platforms offer a large variety of formats so matching up the new platform to something similar as the old platform is typically not hard.  If you happen to use custom layouts then the code can typically be copied over to a new platform and appear exactly the same.

3. Tracking / Analytics

It’s best to download or archive your tracking data from your digital marketing platform because it’s rare to have that migrate. If you archive your analytics as saved charts or in a spreadsheet then you can continue your standard analysis without pause until you have sufficient data on the new platform.

4. Call to Action

System generated calls to action like forms or tracked links often function on a template system. It’s best to analyze which of these calls to action are active so that you can create a duplicate on the new system and relink to that across your marketing channels. If calls to action are old and inactive then it’s a good time to let them expire.

5. Social Media

This is typically a simple setup to set and link up your social media accounts. As long as you have the login information for those accounts readily available, you can quickly integrate social media on the new platform

Of course making a migration will take some time and effort so it’s not something to undertake habitually.  However, if you need to migrate because your current digital marketing platform is no longer available or is no longer meeting your needs, it doesn’t need to be fretted over.  Rather than focusing on all the details that might be different, set a plan for the five elements above.  If you successfully get those five items migrated, you won’t lose any critical component and figuring out the nuances of the new platform becomes a minor task.

Social Media: For Business or Leisure?

Pausing for a moment before posting to social media is sound advice for everyone.  After all, there’s no shortage of unadvisable celebrity tweets that quickly get deleted after a very negative public reaction. So the obvious suggestions, like avoid mixing alcohol and social media, apply.  But digital marketers that are responsible for business communications have another layer of screening they need to be aware of – intermixing business and leisure.

Social media platforms are doing a much better job of integrating business profiles/pages into individual accounts so that a person can administer both from one location.  However, that convenience comes with a price. It’s gotten much easier to post your personal message as if it’s coming from the business.

This lesson was somewhat harmlessly driven home for me when a friend posted a message to Facebook about the restaurant we were at, waited a few moments, and then said, “Shoot, I think I just posted my review to the company Facebook page.” Thankfully she was immediately aware of what she had done, the content wasn’t distasteful, and she removed the post before it became a problem.

Posting to the wrong account can be way more damaging than this based on what the post contains and how long it is live on an account.

So how should a digital marketer handle separating business from leisure? Here’s a few specific tactics.

Don’t post leisure or personal content to Social Media.

More than once I’ve heard it said that the best social media marketers are people that post little or nothing personally.  That’s often said because they don’t tend to get distracted by the sheer volume of content on the platform and instead focus on executing their marketing strategy.  However, it does have a side benefit here.  Digital marketers that don’t use the platform socially eliminate the risk of accidentally posting leisure content to their business profile

Always finish a social media session in your personal profile.

It’s easy to leave your business profile loaded on your phone or device, forget which profile is active when you load it again, and haphazardly publish something to the business profile by mistake.  Getting in the habit of always ending a session on your personal profile insures that the worst case scenario is a business message landing on the personal profile which is almost always easier to clear up. It’s worth noting that business messages on a personal profile still need to be corrected as it’s possible the marketer that posted it is not a qualified representative of the company to deliver the content.

Only publish business posts via a social media content app.

Social media publishing apps allows for digital marketers to set aside a period of time to create their content and pre-schedule them according to their publishing calendar. That largely eliminates the need for the use of a phone or device for direct business posts where spontaneity can often lead to errors.

The answer to avoiding a toxic mixture of leisure and business in social media really comes down to diligently reviewing anything before posting. Set some safeguards in place so that content your social network would enjoy doesn’t get shared to your business community who might find it unsuitable.

Social Media: Not Even Waiting For Your Turn to Talk

Digital communications is a crowded environment, that’s no secret. It tends to also be chaotic because most digital marketers are focused exclusively on getting their message heard.  This can make a shared environment like social media seem like a competitive shouting match. Everyone speaking at once is as ineffective digitally as it is in person.  Do you want to differentiate yourself from other digital marketing messages on social media? Make listening key to your strategy.

Social media listening is not about spreading a wide net over as many contacts as you can and then trying to keep up on all those posts and topics.  It means selectively targeting some content or users to interact with on a more one-to-one basis.  You can target content based on insightful subjects for your audience, product or service, or industry news.  You can target individuals based on shared connections, industry influence, or ideal prospects.

Really listen to those finely selected channels.  Chances are that you can glean a lot of insight into their needs and wants which can be leveraged toward your targeted network.

Once you engage with that audience it’s important to continue listening.  As an example, we reviewed a client profile where he had dozens of unanswered comments to his posts.  One comment in particular was from a prominent industry influencer with an insightful comment and a follow-up question. Listening to that question and providing an individualized response would have been a much better strategy than ignoring it and blasting out more content to the masses.

Listening is always important and social media is not an exception.  Most digital marketers don’t even wait for their turn to speak and opt to try and speak over everyone else.  Engage your audience in a more meaningful way and you’ll find that you don’t have to yell nearly as loud as everyone else to get profitable attention.

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