Don’t Overbuild a Digital Marketing Application

Scoping out a new digital marketing application can be one of the most fun parts of crafting a marketing campaign.  Imagining all the leads and/or sales can lead you to a perfectly optimized call to action.  But it’s more likely to lead you to an overbuilt application that gets little use. When launching a new digital marketing application focus on achieving the basic requirements so that you can roll it out.  Then decide if further enhancements are warranted based on usage and feedback.

Let’s think through this on a simple example, a website form.  A simple option would be to use a form processor that emails the content to you.  That can be quickly launched but formatting, organization, and security might all be a concern in that method.  So are any of those truly a problem?  If so then something more robust is required.

The next step up would be a form processor that populates a database.  A report feature from the database could solve formatting concerns.  The data would be uniformly organized in a database. And sensitive data would not be delivered via unsecured email communications.  But maybe you need the data to populate into your CMS or maybe the form collects payment details and needs full encryption?

Then you might move to a more complex solution that integrates with your CMS and provides true ecommerce security.

Working from the simplest option to the most complex is often a valuable exercise because it lets you question your true requirements.  Many times trainers, consultants, or professional coaches will default to a complex option even if the features aren’t really needed.

This obviously increases time and cost to launch. Perhaps even more detrimental is it can hinder user adoption. There’s nothing worse than building what seemed to be the perfect digital marketing application only to find that users:

• Don’t see the value in it
• Think it’s too complex
• Request significant modifications outside the scope of what’s been developed

Launching the simplest version of your application solves all those problems.

• If they don’t see value in it, at least you can cut your losses and move on to something more useful without wasting significant time, money, and effort.
• The simplest version is rarely more complex than users can handle.
• Requests for modification are easier to undertake as time and budget have not been exhausted and the development cycle is not as mature so it can agilely shift in new directions to accommodate enhancement requests.

The best digital marketing applications tend to be an iterative process of improvement.  Rather than assuming you can develop the best version of the application on your own, develop a simple version on your own and then go through a process of evolution based on usage and feedback to craft a better version of the application than you could have initially imagined.