The Right Tool, or the Tool for Right Now?
Finding the right tool set for running your digital marketing campaigns is essential. The right toolset allows for digital marketers to effectively, efficiently, and responsibly deliver their messages to a targeted group. Reducing that set of platforms and applications to the simplest marketing system that meets all of your needs is an ongoing process of evaluation and refinement.
The importance of having the right tools is rarely lost on digital marketers as the wrong tool, or a disconnect between tools, results in timely manual fixes that eat up a day. Understanding the importance of getting the right digital marketing tools can help marketers find an effective toolset, but it can also cause over analysis and inefficiency in searching for the perfect tool.
To spare anyone searching for the perfect tool or series of tools some pain, it doesn’t exist. There is no perfect digital marketing platform or set of tools that work best across the board. Individual businesses or organizations have to analyze available options and find the right mix of capabilities that meets their available resources and budget.
So with that said, it’s OK to have a tool for “right now”. Just because a tool is not specifically designed for your need or doesn’t have all the functionality you seek, doesn’t mean it can’t be a good interim solution as you move toward an even better option. Improvising is a valuable skill in getting your marketing tools to mold to your needs rather than trying to fit all your needs within a packaged product. Better to have a tool that meets some of your requirements rather than one that meets all of them but is not realistic in the short term.
It’s not uncommon to find trainers, consultants, or professional coaches that have been introduced to a new marketing tool that seems perfect but they need to wait on resources or budget. Rather than implementing an option that might immediately help, they fantasize about the ideal mix of this “perfect” tool.
Even if the tool is perfect, which no tool is, it will be less than perfect as time passes. Digital marketing tools are all technology based. That means a rapidly changing environment and set of capabilities. Even twelve months from now, your marketing initiatives and process will have likely evolved enough that an ideal tool will be slightly out of alignment.
As you evaluate tools to add to your marketing toolset, look at realistic options for right now. Implementing a tool now doesn’t mean you can’t upgrade later. But delaying any tool will mean that initiatives are delayed indefinitely or that running those initiates will be needlessly time consuming.