Review your Digital Marketing for Outdated Information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A client recently asked us to review their search positions and we realized that they had an outdated google listing for a location that had since closed, and no listing for their other locations.  To make matters more confusing, the owner of the outdated account had moved on to a different company without transferring administrative rights to anyone at the company.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

Leverage Your Personal Style for Improved Digital Marketing Content

Every trainer, consultant, and professional coach has their own style.  That style can run the gamut from academic to entertaining and anything in between.  Unfortunately, when digital marketing material is being compiled, much of the personality is sterilized to make communications sound “professional”. Personal style can and should co-exist with professional communications to make them more authentic and engaging.

Personal style can come across in any media but none are as obvious as video. The default presentation seems to be a talking head offering a tactic or strategy on a watered down topic in a very serious manner.  If that’s the presenter’s natural style, it can be pulled off but that’s often not a genuine delivery.

It’s advantageous to be yourself in digital marketing messages. Sit down or insert your own brand of humor in a video if that’s your natural style.  It’s OK to use your own sayings or analogies in your writing as long as it’s clearly described in an article.  Even the images that you use can help reflect and reinforce you or your firm’s style.

Leveraging your own style in digital marketing communications will be interpreted as more genuine and allows the audience to get a glimpse of who they could potentially work with.  While your style won’t sync up with everyone, at least it will attract the type of person more likely to buy from you.  And it will help differentiate your messages from the sterilized content that seems to be so prevalent.

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.

Digital Marketers Need to Have an Eye on Cyber Security

What good is a website that is constantly having outages? How useful is a hijacked social media account publishing questionable offers? What about an email marketing platform loaded with stolen email addresses blasting out SPAM?  Digital marketing channels infected with malware or compromised in some way not only undermine the time, energy, and money invested in that campaign, but it can also cause lasting damage to your company’s reputation.

Cyber security is a fast paced and technically complex topic.  Digital marketers will have a difficult time being experts on all the nuances involved.  However, they can be a first line of defense by proactively recognizing signs of trouble and raising a warning.

Diligence is key to preventing the worst aspects of a security breach in your digital marketing. Here are two examples of how we’ve correctly and incorrectly approached security breaches in digital marketing.

Diligent Behavior

Several years ago a client’s email marketing account more than doubled its contact list overnight. While they regularly added contacts, it was an uncommonly large import so we reviewed the contact information and found only email addresses with no contact info.  It was also uncommon for contacts to be added without at least a name in addition to the email address.

While we contacted the client to see if the names were legitimate, we also requested that the email platform put a hold on any scheduled emails until we verified the contacts.  It turned out that the account had been compromised from an employee traveling internationally and several SPAM emails were already loaded to be sent to the list from that account.  Thankfully we were able to re-secure the site and remove the contacts before any communications were delivered.

Lack of Diligent Behavior

Recently our site experienced several outages.  We investigated the problem, repaired it, and did some basic security steps like password resets. But we were not as diligent as we should have been.  After the third outage within a month and speaking with our web host on the technical details, we realized that there must be a malware infection.  That’s when we got fully committed to resolving the issue with a fresh installation of wordfence to review our WordPress site.

Wordfence found several compromised files and was able to remove those.  Thankfully that stabilized the site and we’ve had no recurrences of the problem.  Our issue was simple enough that it didn’t require a more in-depth or expensive repair process. However, our lack of diligence on our own site unnecessarily led to additional outages.

Cybersecurity isn’t often top of mind in digital marketing like anti-virus programs for computers or mobile devices. But servers and digital marketing accounts can be compromised just like any personal device.  Security plugins like wordfence, list reviews on email marketing platforms, and password management applications are valuable tools to prevent security breaches but they aren’t fool proof.  It’s important for digital marketers to keep an eye out for vulnerabilities. More importantly digital marketers need to raise a warning to any suspicious activity and be diligent in quickly and thoroughly resolving the problem so that it doesn’t undermine their marketing gains.

Troubleshooting WordPress for Unexpected Technical Problems

Nothing disrupts the productivity of a day like an unexpected technical problem.  It can derail your whole agenda and reset the day to troubleshooting.  When technical issues arise it’s important to limit your frustration and stay calm.  Mysterious technical problems are almost always the result of something changing so doing some systematic detective work can save a lot of time in uncovering the problem.

We experienced an issue several weeks ago where our pages randomly started loading slowly and, more often than not, they timed out. The issue was even odder in that it did not affect the blog.  Both the blog and the webpages were served from the same instance of WordPress on the same host. 

Here are the steps we took to isolate and resolve the issue.

  • Review Plugins – Plugins are a common culprit for WordPress sites misbehaving.  Plugins are frequently updated and every update does have the potential to cause problems. Since the issue was only present on the pages, we suspected it might be a plugin that was only active on that content type.  We deactivated all the plugins but found that it made no difference in the load time performance. Plugins had no affect so we reactivated them.
  • Site Templates – Our second idea was that the site temple might be causing the issue.  Our template has several customizations and we had recently upgraded our version of WordPress.  Could our customization be causing a conflict with the new version of WordPress?  We activated a new stock template and found that the performance issues were still in place. No luck there, so we restored our template.
  • Host Changes – Fearing that there might be a compatibility issue between our host service and the new version of WordPress, we contacted the host.  After talking through the issue and getting some ideas from one of their engineers, we realized that the problem was a conflict with the version of PHP that the host was running and the updated version of WordPress.  Thankfully the host was aware of the conflict and already taking steps to resolve it.
  • Downgrade versions – Our last step, that we thankfully didn’t need to take given the hosts time frame, was to downgrade to a previous version of WordPress.  It’s important to follow a process when downgrading to make sure that your data is available for restoration in case the downgrade malfunctions.

The example is specific to WordPress but the process is the same in most troubleshooting situations.  Identify possible changes and systematically deactivate them, check for resolution, and reactivate them if the problem persists.  Then move on to the next potential problem. 

It’s also best to try resolutions starting with the simplest first.  Spending a lot of time enacting a complicated fix only to find that the solution was much simpler is an aggravating moment we’d all like to avoid.

Technical problems will arise but if you logically list out changes and systematically test what might have caused the problem, you will find a solution in a much more reasonable amount of time than jumping to conclusions in a frantic effort to resolve the issue.

Image courtesy of  Daniel Aleksandersen / www.ctrl.blog

Dedicate Time for Site Clean Up and Organization

Do you have a child with a perpetually messy room or a co-worker with a chronically cluttered desk?  Often times, seemingly disorganized people claim that they know where everything is in that mess.  Sometimes that turns out to be true.  However, a lot of times it’s not exactly accurate and even they struggle to find what they need.   Most company websites slowly accumulate content which gradually moves them to being that cluttered mess.  Dedicating scheduled time to organizing the materials on the website can ultimately drive more efficiency both in your digital marketing campaigns as well as your technical improvements.

A company’s website often serves as the central point of contact for all of its digital marketing channels.  As digital marketing reach and content grows, the website tends to organically expand to support those initiatives.  This expansion often creates an ungainly and disorganized set of files and folders that can be very difficult to maintain.

Many site owners use the same excuse as the messy child or co-worker, “I know where everything is”.  Even if that is true, it doesn’t account for that individual being unavailable or moving on to a different company or role.  It’s becoming less common for a single person to be the point person for all website activities.  Technical contacts and marketing partners also need access to the site for updates, upgrades, and integrations.  Sorting through cluttered file structures to accomplish tasks creates additional time and effort for every single initiative.

As a primary site owner it’s important to dedicate some time to review, organization, and retirement of the content on the website.  It’s likely to save you time personally but will save significant time for partners that don’t have as much visibility on how the site has grown.  The clean-up and reorganization can also be a clue as to whether your site’s navigation, which often mirrors file structure, could use some realignment.

Keeping your site as lean as possible with clean up initiatives sounds like a low priority item to most digital marketers.  And it is true that it can’t displace critical technical or digital marketing tasks.  That’s why it’s important to set a schedule so that it’s not perpetually on the back burner. 

This recurring clean-up process will make updates easier to complete because content is easier to find, current, and relevant.

Be Suspicious of Your CMS’s Publishing

Are you taking your Content Management System’s word for it that content has been published?  Sooner or later it’s likely you’ll find that you’ve been lied to.  It’s always a good idea to check the actual page to ensure that the CMS has actually pushed the content, rather than relying on the CMS’s confirmation.

Publishing new or updated content on your website or social pages can often happen in a rush or on the fly.  In those instances, it’s tempting to hit publish and move on to the next task, especially when the CMS has marked the content as live.  Those situations are inevitably when your CMS will lie to you and you’ll have to circle back to correct content that has not published.

This problem can happen on any CMS platform because any platform can fail to move the new content through to the server or service that it’s hosted on. It can often be a delay or time out issue that prevents an update from publishing correctly. Obviously, more robust website CMS platforms run more of a risk of publishing failures because they have more functions that might fail. This risk is even higher on modular CMS templates where pages, segments, components, assets, or widgets all need to be published separately to make a unified whole.

The good news is that there is a simple solution that works on all platforms.  Check the page or post on your live site.  If you find that updates are not appearing, be sure to get the newest version of your page or post by holding down the shift key and refreshing your page (this makes sure you’re not loading an old version from your browser cache). Checking the live site rather than trusting the CMS’s confirmation, verifies the publishing process and the timing of the published content before using it in your digital marketing.

Keep a Record of Your Digital Marketing Resources

Digital marketing is often a complicated mix of communication, technology, marketing, and administration in a rapidly shifting landscape. Add changing personnel and a wide variety of tools and it can become chaotic. As digital marketing initiatives evolve and change course, it’s important that the professional(s) driving that initiative can quickly and accurately execute on the new plan. Nothing slows that process down as quickly as being disorganized about who owns a particular resource.

Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches rely on external providers for some or all of their digital marketing needs. It’s important to have a well-organized list of all those resources and who to contact for each element.

We recently encountered a situation where an SSL certificate needed to be added to a client’s website for a new application. The digital digital marketing campaign was poised for launch but acquiring the SSL certificate proved to be a hold up. Contacting the website host was the natural assumption but it turned out that the host was not the site registrar. No one at the client office seemed to know where the site was registered. After some wild goose chases, the administrator at the client office discovered that the original site creator, who had moved on to a different job, had registered the site. Thankfully we were able to contact the original site creator who hunted down the registrar information so that we could purchase the SSL certificate.

Unfortunately, the delay caused the digital marketing campaign to launch about two weeks later than anticipated. That shortened schedule reduced pre-launch registration lead times and results were not as high as they otherwise could have been.

This was not a disaster but serves well as a cautionary tale on how missing information on even an infrequently used resource can cause a noticeable setback. Had there been an accurate list of digital marketing resources then the registrar records would have been on file which would have eliminated the need to contact the original creator. Even having the original creator listed as the contact for the site could have trimmed down the delay.

It’s important to be organized and up to date with your digital marketing resources, both people and tools. If you don’t currently have an accurate record, it’s best to create one now when there isn’t an urgent need rather than waiting until that need arises and suffering delays because of it.

Roll Out Schedule: Single Launch or Phased Releases

Our site update is getting closer to completion and you may have noticed in the last several posts that we’ve released updates in phases.  Four to be exact: blog update, website update, content revision, and SEO element revision.  Hopefully those last two were less obvious or invisible to our visitors but this phased rollout raises the question, why not get all the updates set up and then do a single launch? Neither a single launch nor a phased rollout is appropriate for all situations but each offer unique advantages that trainers, consultants, and professional coaches should consider when rolling out an update.

  • Phased Release 

    Phased releases have the advantage of evaluating elements of your update without the whole project going live. It’s an important aspect of the AGILE process and allows for intermittent testing and analysis. It also allows for individual elements to launch faster rather than waiting for the whole update to be go-live ready.

  • Single Launch 

    Launching an update all at one time is a more traditional method but still offers advantages. Cohesion is the biggest benefit.  For example, if you are updating a layout for an email campaign, it’s best to have the design fully fleshed out rather than launching with a half-developed concept. A single launch can also be used as a promotional tool if the update is significant enough that it might draw attention from your audience.

 

In our case, launching the blog update gave a badly needed refresh to our posts while allowing us to test the template before deploying it to the rest of the site.  While the interim period lacked cohesion between the site and the blog, we were sure to have a post explaining the process. Once the template was deployed site wide, it was an obvious choice to make content and SEO element updates live as they were ready because they were unlikely to be visible to our visitors.

Phased launches are often most beneficial due to their expedited go-live process and ability to test the results. However, a solid production schedule must be defined and followed.  If your digital marketing often gets postponed or you’ve struggled to adhere to deadlines, then a single launch might be a better fit.  A perpetual “under construction” notice or half-baked appearance gives your audience the impression that your marketing, and therefore your product or service, is not your primary focus. A phased rollout that gets stuck mid-change causes confusion, often looks unprofessional, and might negatively impact your processes.

If you can logically break up your project into multiple releases, do a phased launch.  If you can’t see any natural breaks or are uncertain of your ability to consistently move through those releases, do a single launch.

Have You Gotten Lazy with Digital Marketing Technology?

Have You Gotten Lazy with Digital Marketing Technology?Step one of updating our blog (and the site) is complete with a new theme.  The next step is to finish our theme customization and launch the layout site wide.  We don’t update our site layout as often as we should so it provides a clear illustration in how technology has evolved over the last few years.  The options, sophistication, and ease of an upgrade makes significant advances in such a relatively short amount of time.  But do these advances make us spoiled and lazy?  If you aren’t putting in the effort to meet your desired result, then yes. It’s your responsibility to provide the resources necessary to professionally deliver your digital marketing.

As we weighed themes and what base layout we’d like to establish for our upgrade, I browsed reviews for user feedback.  I happened across this review with some very specific requests for a “boring” theme. I happen to agree with the poster that many themes are over-designed and create additional work hiding elements that aren’t necessary.  I thought the rest of the post suggesting that developers should strive for the specific set of features that the poster desired was absurd.

I’m a home improvement DIY person. Most projects go fine . . . some don’t.  Recently, I falsely believed that replacing my gas dryer was going to be a simple process.  I knew the steps involved and had all the materials, however I wasn’t prepared for the gas hose to be corroded onto the gas line.  Since I was already a bit wary of working on gas, I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and called a plumber.  It was a simple job for the plumber who had a giant wrench and a particular technique to unscrew the hose from the pipe.

Sometimes an easy job for a professional is an impossible job for a less experienced person.  Imagine if I had asked the plumber to bring his giant wrench to my house and walk me through separating the hose from the pipe.  Most people would agree that’s ridiculous yet here’s a post asking for almost the same thing from a theme developer.

WordPress themes are typically built on a series of CSS and PHP files.  All the code that drives that theme is accessible which means with some work it can be customized to whatever layout you want.  Furthermore, many themes will document those files to make it simpler to make the edits for customization.  It’s not the theme developers responsibility to spoon feed it to you.

As technology becomes all pervasive there seems to be a feeling of entitlement that users should be able to do anything without putting in the effort or resources to achieve it.  Just because some things offer simple point and click or drag and drop, doesn’t mean that all things can or should.

Let’s be grateful to the theme developers that typically provide a solid foundation for site builds. If you need functional or layout customization beyond that, it’s your responsibility to seek out the resources or professionals to do so.  Don’t be lazy about how you implement the technology because it’s extremely unlikely that the perfect solution will fall into your lap.  Take responsibility for implementing your own perfect solution.

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