Assessing whether a new piece of digital marketing news or tech development needs your attention
This week we’ve been giving you tools and tips on how to stay on top of the vast amount of digital marketing news and advice. A huge amount is published every day and it can be both challenging and time-consuming to keep up with it all, so we have been recommending tools and techniques to stop marketers drowning in content.
Having these tools to help you not miss new developments is handy, and signing up to email newsletters to get regular updates can save time browsing blogs and searching out the latest changes to key platforms. However, because there are so many changes made all the time to key digital marketing channels such as Google and Facebook, it is still really tough to know when a new update means you need to change the way you run your marketing.
So there is a risk you that with all the advice exhorting you to try this tool or that technique you will be constantly chasing shiny new objects and acting like a 'headless chicken'. It's a much better feeling to take control to evaluate the options and prioritise on the actions that are the best opportunities.
In this article I'll take a brief look at ways to prioritise we use and recommend.
Let's taken an example... Last week we reported that Instagram has just launched a new feature to allow desktop users to search hashtags, accounts and images. If your business uses Instagram extensively for its marketing this could be big news for you, but if your business does not use Instagram for it’s marketing efforts it would be nothing but a waste of time to read about how the changes will affect users.
Dave Chaffey explains here how the 70-20-10 rule can be applied to help you prioritise. You should focus your efforts on improving and optimising the 70% of online marketing techniques that drive volume, while also allowing 10% for testing new techniques which look relevant for reaching or persuading your target audience. At a more strategic level for prioritising on a range of features Dave has written about using technology hype cycles and risk/reward matrices to help you priority.
For me, for platforms, this is how I see it - here's a handy flow chart to help you assess if you need to action a given piece of marketing news about a technology platform.
For example, Facebook recently changed its CPC calculation for advertisers. If you see this news and you are a company that uses Facebook organically and never runs paid adverts on the platform then you would go answer yes on the first stage of the flowchart because you do use the platform but then no on every subsequent stage because it won’t affect how you will be using it, your marketing outcomes or your customers. Therefore, you don’t need to act.
However if you were an agency which runs large paid Facebook campaigns for clients regularly then you would answer yes to the first two stages, and would need to act. Your team would need to be informed of all the changes and you would need to research them in more depth so you knew exactly what had changed and the ramifications for the business.
What next?
Once you’ve assessed that you need to act on a given piece of digital marketing news, what should be your next steps? We suggest you use this checklist to think about what steps you need to take.
- Will this affect your processes outside of just the marketing department? If so make sure to communicate it across the business.
- Will it make your marketing on the platform more or less effective? Either way this should mean you review your digital strategy. Would it be wise to shift resources to the channel if it has become more effective, or move them away from it if it has become less effective?
- How will let your followers/customers know if the change is going to affect how they use the platform? If it is a social media channel then telling them about it on the channel itself is a good start. Consider announcing it in an email to customers as well.
- How are competitors reacting to the change? Are they capitalising on it or ignoring it? See what they are doing to stimulate ideas and not miss out on anything, but if they aren’t acting that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!
- Are you unclear as to the ramifications the change will have for your business? Do some further research. If possible read industry-specific blogs about the change to see how it is affecting things within your industry.
This list is by no means exhaustive, it is meant as more of a cursory glance. For more advanced resources to help you with your digital strategy see our solutions page.
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