Month: December 2019

Set Your Digital Marketing Priorities

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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

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Site Conversion, Social Media

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

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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

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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