Month: July 2019

Is Your Marketing Automation Too Complex?

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Who doesn’t love the sound of “automation”?  Often the exhilaration for marketing automation is rooted in marketing professionals that are spread thin, subconsciously hearing an implication of getting something for nothing.  Unfortunately there is a cost to everything.  The obvious cost of automation is the investment of time, money, and/or energy to establish the automated processes.  However, there is also a risk in automation becoming too aggressive and causing as many problems as it solves because the workflows for the automation are simply too complex.

The more complex a machine is, the more likely it is to break down.  Automation is no different. Complexity typically comes in the form of:

  1. The number of platforms – The more tools you add in your workflow, dictates that each platform has to hand off the process to the next in the chain.  Every one of these touch points is a common culprit of automation break down.
  2. How long the chain of events is in the workflow – The more consecutive steps added in your automation process means that a longer string of actions has to run trouble free to complete the process. The longer the chain of events the higher the probability of a failure.
  3. Time to complete the process – Time based steps run the risk of throwing the automation out of sync which almost assuredly will create errors.

Minimizing the impact of all these potential problems is to simplify your workflows.

  1. Many platforms have a unique feature or benefit but if it’s not saving significant time or effort, it’s typically best to remove non-critical platforms from the automation process.
  2. Segmenting workflows into modular components often makes the automation more reliable and always makes diagnosing problems easier. It has the added benefit of letting you reuse a piece of your automation in other processes, if applicable.
  3. Time kills reliability.  Technology will experience a break down if given enough time.  Don’t let your automation timelines become too lengthy.  Again modularizing a process into multiple workflows is often helpful if a delay or time based trigger is necessary.

Automation is often looked at as an ideal solution for executing sophisticated digital marketing campaigns.  However, backtracking and remedying complex automation problems can quickly undermine the time saved from implementing the automation in the first place.  Simplifying and modularizing your marketing automation is typically advisable even if it requires a minor manual process.

Internet Marketing

Are All Businesses Technology Companies?

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It’s becoming increasingly common for people to say that their business is a digital or technology company regardless of the industry, product, or service they offer.  To be honest, this statement often rings hollow when reviewing their digital capabilities. There’s many companies, big and small, claiming to be “technology companies” that aren’t particularly adept with technology. Undeniably technology is becoming more and more prevalent but it’s important that digital marketing stays focused on the content or services that drives value for clients.

Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches are following this trend of categorizing themselves by how their content is delivered rather than by the content they offer. Even if you have a sophisticated interactive webinar training series or best-in-class online learning platform, the material being delivered via those digital channels is what drives the value, not the channels themselves. 

It’s fine to highlight digital benefits or technical conveniences, but those things are not going to increase engagement on their own. The best technology tends to be platforms and processes that go unnoticed.  That’s the ideal scenario where clients and prospects enjoy the benefits of your technical delivery without thinking or struggling with it.  If you are using technology as a diffentiator, focus on how it delivers your valuable content seamlessly rather than the technology itself.  Your digital systems won’t mind being an unsung hero.

Image Courtesy of gleonhard / flickr.com

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion

Troubleshooting WordPress for Unexpected Technical Problems

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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

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