Digital and Email Marketing Strategies and Tactics | eMarketing Innovation in Pittsburgh PA

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

December 17, 2019 Leave a comment

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.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Web Maintenance

Digital Marketers Need to Have an Eye on Cyber Security

December 3, 2019 Leave a comment

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.

Email Marketing, Web Maintenance

Know Your Digital Marketing Metric Flow

November 20, 2019 Leave a comment

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.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion

Video Content Without Elaborate Production Capabilities

November 5, 2019 Leave a comment

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.

Internet Marketing

Define Your Digital Marketing Niche Focus

October 22, 2019 Leave a comment

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.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion

Making Efficient Design Decisions in Digital Marketing

October 9, 2019 Leave a comment

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.

Internet Marketing

Knowledge Transfer for Digital Marketing

September 24, 2019 Leave a comment

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

Internet Marketing

Is Hootsuite’s Link Preview Deceiving You?

September 10, 2019 Leave a comment

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.

Social Media

Email Marketing Whitelisting Activities

August 28, 2019 Leave a comment

If you find that your email marketing platform is not whitelisting your communications then it’s imperative to set a review process. Reviews can largely be done by the digital marketer but having a few trusted recipients on your email marketing list from outside your company is a valuable resource so that they can report their own experience with your email deliverability.

Once you have a review process and core group of recipients there are three tiers of deliverability that you’ll want to cover. Starting from the smallest to the largest (or easiest to hardest):

Individual

The individuals receiving your email can greatly help deliverability by adding you as a trusted sender. Most email systems allow them to do that by simply adding your email address to their contact list. Sending a periodic email or an automated email on sign-up asking recipients to save your email as a contact can help keep your communications out of their SPAM box.

Company or Organization

Any company or organization that has their own URL likely have administrative settings set up on the email service to block SPAM. Server administrators for that organization can whitelist your email address on their servers to ensure its delivered to individual email addresses that they host. The biggest challenge in getting an organization to whitelist your emails is identifying the most suitable person. Sending a request to individuals within the organization even if it’s from a personal email to whitelist your emails is often the simplest way to find the server admin that can whitelist your email marketing address.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

This is the most technically complex and potentially most damaging category. ISPs monitor complaints and if your email address receives too many complaints (rightly or wrongly) ISPs might begin to block your email messages. This can happen on ISP email platforms (gmail, outlook.com, yahoo, etc.) but it can also filter downstream to organization servers or individual settings that receive your IP address as a problem sender.

The best advice is to be proactive and only send marketing communications to those that opt-in. It’s also beneficial to minimize bounced emails by removing bad addresses from your list. If you still find that your communications are being blocked then you’ll need to identify which ISPs are blocking your messages and contact that individual service. This list is a little dated but provides a thorough listing of ISPs.

It’s best to have a proactive monitoring process but sometimes deliverability problems pop up without warning. Be sure to review any reports of deliverability problems which often come from loyal recipients inquiring on why they are no longer receiving emails.

Immediately take action on these problems as your reputation scores will get shared across servers. That means if one ISP or server lists you as a problem sender then any small flag on other servers will block your emails. Ignoring small deliverability problems can easily snowball to more widespread deliverability problems as your IP or URL is blacklisted.

Whitelisting can be a complex issue to monitor and time consuming to resolve but email marketing that doesn’t reach it’s intended recipient is a waste of time, money, and energy. If your email marketing service is not taking these steps on your behalf then it’s critical to monitor your deliverability to ensure that the communications you craft will actually be seen by your intended audience.

Image Courtesy of nokhoog_buchachon / freedigitalphotos.net

Email Marketing

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