Keep a Record of Your Digital Marketing Resources
Digital marketing is often a complicated mix of communication, technology, marketing, and administration in a rapidly shifting landscape. Add changing personnel and a wide variety of tools and it can become chaotic. As digital marketing initiatives evolve and change course, it’s important that the professional(s) driving that initiative can quickly and accurately execute on the new plan. Nothing slows that process down as quickly as being disorganized about who owns a particular resource.
Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches rely on external providers for some or all of their digital marketing needs. It’s important to have a well-organized list of all those resources and who to contact for each element.
We recently encountered a situation where an SSL certificate needed to be added to a client’s website for a new application. The digital digital marketing campaign was poised for launch but acquiring the SSL certificate proved to be a hold up. Contacting the website host was the natural assumption but it turned out that the host was not the site registrar. No one at the client office seemed to know where the site was registered. After some wild goose chases, the administrator at the client office discovered that the original site creator, who had moved on to a different job, had registered the site. Thankfully we were able to contact the original site creator who hunted down the registrar information so that we could purchase the SSL certificate.
Unfortunately, the delay caused the digital marketing campaign to launch about two weeks later than anticipated. That shortened schedule reduced pre-launch registration lead times and results were not as high as they otherwise could have been.
This was not a disaster but serves well as a cautionary tale on how missing information on even an infrequently used resource can cause a noticeable setback. Had there been an accurate list of digital marketing resources then the registrar records would have been on file which would have eliminated the need to contact the original creator. Even having the original creator listed as the contact for the site could have trimmed down the delay.
It’s important to be organized and up to date with your digital marketing resources, both people and tools. If you don’t currently have an accurate record, it’s best to create one now when there isn’t an urgent need rather than waiting until that need arises and suffering delays because of it.