Systematize Your Digital Marketing

Technology is evolving at a rapid pace and that rate of change has filtered into digital marketing. We wrote a post on simplifying your digital marketing systems but some training, consulting, and professional coaching firms make the opposite mistake of not sufficiently automating their digital marketing. It’s important to review your processes to eliminate unnecessary manual processes because the repetition will suck up the time necessary to stay competitive as new digital marketing technologies become available.

Sometimes it can be difficult to know how complicated it is to automate a process and whether it is worth the time, money, and/or energy to do so. There is a simple way of judging if a marketing process should be automated or not. How much and how often is data being duplicated? If it’s a significant amount of data that is often manually manipulated, then an automated process will likely be well worth the effort.

This dilemma recently came up with a client’s new website platform. The platform updated the layout to a modern design but lacked many of the back-end marketing systems that had previously allowed for automation.

The initial plan was to use a varied mix of vendor automation tools. For instance, email newsletter registrations would link to a form on the email marketing platform. However, it became apparent that segmenting all the data to different platforms was going to make for a disjointed user experience and require manual compiling and reconciliation into a central data source. That was adding an administrative process with no value add to a marketing team that was already stretched. Instead we created a system of embedding the forms on the site so that they would populate the individual platforms but also be available in a central data source.

Sometimes automation isn’t as obvious. On this same website platform, a set of a few dozen calls to action were regularly used on any new content page or blog post. That process had always been manually added to the page but was identified as something that should be a clickable embedded item on the upgraded platform. So rather than setting the CTA up each time, the poster could select which CTA they wanted and it would appear on page.

Repetitive processes should be automated. They tend to add little value for improving digital marketing and are often a boring line item on someone’s task list. Remove that manual process and free yourself up to implement or explore new digital marketing tools and tactics that are now regularly becoming available.