Monday, November 18, 2013

Sanity amidst digital marketing

As someone who worked in digital marketing before business school, I found this article "3 Digital Marketing Tips to Help You Stay Sane" extremely accurate and useful for potential digital marketers. The three tips and some examples of real-life application are as follows:

  • Don't over analyze, particularly the frequency with which you track stats. I was responsible for executing email campaigns and reporting on the various results to my boss - click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes, A/B test results, etc. Not to say these were not important measures, but similar to what is mentioned in the article, the more frequently I viewed these stats just to see if they changed even by a little bit, the more stressed out I was. It takes time to achieve desired results, particularly when conducting A/B testing to new audiences. 
  • Automate when possible. When I assisted with the launch of my former employer's new website, automation for certain functions (i.e., blog posts, content updates) was key. My colleague was managing our social media and using tools such as Sprout Social made his job significantly easier through tools like scheduling tweets and analyzing statistics.
  • Hire out, especially for "mundane" projects that require "dense, mind-numbing Excel spreadsheets". As an example, the marketing department was responsible for list-building - aka building entire lists of up to 1000 B2B contacts, including names, emails, addresses, phone numbers, and qualifying criteria for the sales team. Once we outsourced the list-building aspect of our marketing outreach efforts, the time in which we could execute campaigns was reduced exponentially. One caveat here is to "Never sacrifice quality for inexpensive outsourced labor." Echoing that sentiment, you definitely get your money's worth when it comes to vendors and outsourcing.  

No comments: