What good is a plan if there is no action taken on it?  Imagine a coach setting up a game plan only to have the players wing it on game day or a cookbook where the chef wants to experiment with other ingredients.  A lack of execution on the plan makes the effort of creating a strategic design pointless. Digital marketing thrives on systematic execution and a content calendar is a great tool to pre-plan topics and set a schedule for its release. Creating a content calendar without the discipline to execute the behaviors to fulfill it, is a creative way of appearing productive while wasting time.

The amount of content that gets released through digital marketing can be overwhelming.  Topics across all the channels need to sync up to make a cohesive campaign.  So setting a content calendar with timelines is a great way to organize and visualize a strategic implementation.

Unfortunately many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches visualize it well but implement it poorly.  This typically happens because planned content doesn’t materialize as expected or other activities take priority over the content calendar.

If you are going to spend the time to make a content calendar, commit to extending the timetable to ensuring the behaviors are in place to execute on the calendar.

For example, don’t include items in your content calendar unless the content is already prepared.  Rather than assuring yourself that you’ll get an article or video ready by a deadline on your content calendar, have it finalized before it’s set on the calendar. Otherwise, distractions and delays will inevitably keep some of the content from being ready when the calendar calls for it. That means that content needs to be worked on weeks or months in advance of its release.

Also, set people or processes in place that automate time sensitive releases so that emergencies don’t derail the digital marketing timeline. A strategic plan remains the plan even if the behaviors to accomplish it are suddenly an inconvenience. This systematic implementation ensures you’ll execute on the strategy despite disruptions.

A content calendar without the behavior to execute on the plan is fruitless intent.  Don’t waste time deluding yourself about what you intended.  Set a solid behavior plan that supports the content calendar so that the true schedule follows your strategic plan.

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.

 

In our last post we covered why A/B testing can be difficult for some companies to effectively implement. But that doesn’t mean the principles of testing should be abandoned completely.  An evolutionary process of consistent improvement is a more gradual way of implementing split tests.

Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches set up a template for a marketing campaign, run it for a period of time until they get sick of it, and then do a redesign which starts the process over again.  While this keeps them up to date on new trends in marketing and technology, it’s not introducing improvements as the campaign runs like A/B testing will.

A/B testing at its best is a duplicate communication with one specific difference.  That difference can then be tested for effectiveness and the better performing treatment is then adopted. Digital marketing campaigns should have some level of repetitiveness especially in layout and design.  These repeating elements can be leveraged as a control and updated one at a time and compared for effectiveness over time in the same way that A/B tests are.

Making gradual split tests while running a digital marketing campaign avoids the common limiting factors of A/B testing but still allows for ongoing testing for gradual improvement.  However, there are a few restrictions to keep in mind.

Time

Time is the primary limiting factor in doing gradual split tests. Because the sends are more spread out, changes cannot be implemented as quickly.  Make sure you allow enough time on a single change to gather sufficient information.  For example, if you have a monthly newsletter you’ll need to run the change twice to validate a changes effectiveness which means each change will take three months to validate.

One Change at a Time

This is really another limiting factor of time but subtly different.  Split testing relies on testing a single element to know that particular change is responsible for an improvement or decline. Having more than one thing changed to speed up the process only serves to invalidate your test.

Same Audience

Since there is a gap of time between treatments you need to keep consistency with the audience. Too many changes into who receives the communication will serve to invalidate the test.

Content

While many elements are repetitive in digital marketing, content often is not.  If you have small elements of recurring content, like an email subject line with repeating title or commonly used social media tags, then by all means test it.  But most of the content variables will not repeat consistently enough to be tested in a gradual ongoing method.

 

If you plan for these restrictions and formulate gradual split test changes around them, you can gather many of the same insights that A/B tests will provide without dedicating nearly as much time or as many resources.