Frustrated with your business blog? This is an indicator that you might not be getting the right digital marketing advice, measuring impactful results, or taking a serious approach to your digital marketing efforts.
Businesses need to consider digital marketing as a serious marketing tool. An example of this lack of focus is shown by too many businesses taking a blogging approach like:
“we blog for the sake of blogging and to show off what the company is doing.”
This showroom tactic doesn’t work very well in the real world. When you look behind the curtain of this system we find inexperienced staff trying their best to learn and apply lessons taught from blogs and other internet resources.
This simply isn’t enough.
It takes a savvy group or individual to execute digital marketing at it’s highest level.
Highest level as it pertains to blogging is defined as creating value to your audience through valuable content that reflects the company’s vision/story. Readers should be able to understand the nuances of the company and how its benefits enrich their lives. From this engagement the business should better understand the behaviors of their community and be capable of measuring targeted results.
High-level and brilliant digital marketers show their capabilities through digital performance metrics and activity that cannot be learned through reading online blogs. Learning through online blogs is how many marketing, communications, and PR departments familiarize themselves with digital marketing tools like blogging. We also see internal teams turning to their current advertising partners for direction and, as a result, often receive generic untested advice. I’m often amazed how many businesses believe the advice from marketers and advertisers who haven’t even built their own businesses with digital media nor executed similar strategies.
This is obviously a recipe for under-performance, so be aware of these dangers that can come from your newly appointed social media manager or other various digital media titles.
How can you as a business identify when your digital marketing is possibly being unknowingly sabotaged by the person responsible for it’s success?
#1 – Tactic driven activity without strategy
Businesses are finding it difficult to distinguish digital marketing strategy from tactics. A tactic is an action you take to execute a strategy. When teams are solely focused on tactics that aren’t connected to a business strategy it’s often because these individuals are getting “ideas” from the internet. Which offers misinformation, nonsense, and formulated templates rather than valuable information, common-sense and properly structured systems and strategies.
Why are they doing this? For the sake of posting.
#2 – No goal
First off, all businesses can improve their goal setting. That being said – participating in digital marketing without a goal means that all time spent is wasted.
A goal is an observable and measurable end result having one or more objectives to be achieved with a more or less fixed time-frame. There is an unlimited amount of strategies that can be used to achieve a business goal, but without a goal, nothing can be achieved.
#3 – Not performing the “What If” test
The “what if” test is a simple way to shed light on what’s an idea, goal, strategy, and tactic. To begin, running your process or activity through this test will enable your team to attach their efforts to business success.
Idea: What if we create multiple versions of this system?
Tactic: What if we develop a website?
Tactic: What if we use a blog?
Strategy: What if we grow customer base by creating a referral system?
Goal: What if we increase market share by 10% in the next 9 months?
Knowing the difference between idea, goal, strategy, and tactic and answering the question “what if” will identify holes in your digital marketing activities and help you work out your plan of attack.
Final Thought
There is a vast chasm between mediocre, and high-level execution. Distinguishing the difference from a managerial perspective can be difficult.
You might be the person unknowingly sabotaging your digital marketing or the manager looking to avoid sabotage. Use this clear indicator of success in your evaluations: people that pour themselves fully into learning/developing the strategies, systems and metrics of digital marketing success will be positioned to unleash success driven activities every day.
Quote: “It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.” Sir Winston Churchill
What’s required is personal development of the individual through learning, knowledgeable consultants and an unyielding desire to be the best at what they do.
Tip: Look to those who are executing the activity you want to do and getting the results you want to achieve and reach out to them to ask for help. Also, read books on strategy, marketing, management, technology, persuasion, writing, and seek those with documented success.