Digital Marketing: Garbage In, Garbage Out

Even though most of us know that shortcuts come with a cost, it’s still enticing to try to do more with less.  Unfortunately, after executing on the shortcut, it usually results in doing less with less.  Digital marketing is full of new applications, automations, and strategies to cut time, money, or effort out of your marketing. While some of these can be successfully integrated into your digital marketing campaigns, most of them either downplay the marketer’s involvement or overhype effectiveness.

A client recently provided us with their graphic generating app.  The idea is that you could select an image and a title and it creates a customized graphic to your brand specifications. The obvious advantage of the app is to not only remove the need to create a custom graphic, but eliminate time intensive reviews for brand standards. That’s an offer that’s difficult to pass up . . . until you use the app.

The images had two pre-set sizes. If you needed a different size, the graphic needed customized manually outside of the app.  The images were also published in low resolution, so it was worthless for print or high resolution requirements. In addition, it had a cumbersome interface so general users outside of the graphics or marketing team struggled to get a usable product.

In short, the tool was so rigid that it required significant compromises or fixes outside of the tool.  Valuable tools don’t need other tools to make them work. After a few weeks of struggling with the tool and manually repairing the output, we reverted back to the manual process for graphic creation until the tool could be “better developed”.

This is not an isolated incident.  Carefully select which apps you want to integrate into your digital marketing processes.  Many claim to make a task simple but downgrade the final product rather than making a quality element easier or faster to integrate. Once you start making compromises to your digital marketing campaigns to suit a tool, you’ve proven that it’s garbage and should look for alternative processes.