Time, money, and energy are the finite resources that you need to distribute across your digital marketing strategically to get the most effective campaign.  This is easily forgotten as different people come together to work on a campaign with distinct perspectives. 

Typically, these perspectives can be broken up into 3 categories.

1. Content
2. Design
3. Technical

Technical resources tend to be used the most effectively because they are often pricy to establish and are fairly objective (either it works or it doesn’t).  Content and design are the categories that see the most wasted resources largely due to their subjectivity.

Every stakeholder in the digital marketing campaigns must hold themselves and other accountable to staying focused and not wasting resources.  This can be uncomfortable if you have an element that you personally want to change or if you have to hold others accountable to moving forward even if they are preoccupied with a particular detail.

Set expectations up front on timelines, budgets, and bandwidth.  If you or any person working on the digital marketing process is addressing trivial details that likely won’t impact the campaign’s goal, then it needs to be tabled as a future improvement, not a current need.

As an example, I was on a conference call recently where half a dozen people were analyzing whether text on a graphic was a very light blue or white.  Obviously it was not a glaring problem since a consensus could not be immediately attained.  I ended up making a suggestion to leave the color as it was and it could be updated on the next communication.  No matter what decision we came to, this subtle difference was not going to have a tangible affect on our marketing campaign’s effectiveness. It simply wasn’t important enough to prevent someone from converting to a lead.

Similar issues can arise with content. I’ve witnessed long email chains debating sentence structure in an article or implied demeanor in a video.

Spending resources to revise a design or content should only take place if there’s a clear impact to the marketing campaigns effectiveness. If a design element is off brand or clearly an error, then it needs fixed.  If the content is unclear or unprofessional, then that should be corrected.  Any other subtle or preference related changes should be noted and updated in future communications rather than wasting resources on retroactive fixes or campaign rework.