I was asked to speak at At-Bristol recently at a gathering of marketing people from the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres.
The topic of choice was strategic marketing. Now, as I made it clear on the day, I’m not – officially, at least – a “marketing person”. Nonetheless, I’ve spent more than a decade working with content-rich organisations on the web, and a core part of my role has been about getting people to stuff. And if that isn’t – at some level at least – about “marketing”, then I don’t know what is.
Rather than doing anything too fluffy and high-level, I thought I’d focus on ten practical activities which ultimately help pull together strategic ways of thinking about digital marketing. The list certainly isn’t definitive, by the way, but it should help…
#1: Develop a Shared Vision
This sounds obvious, but it is actually one of the hardest things to do. When you’re working with cross-departmental teams such as IT, web, marketing, a clearly defined strategy is a difficult thing to agree on. One of the best tricks I’ve found for doing this is to map (visually, if you can!) your high-level organisational strategy to your web and marketing strategies and look for common ground. It helps keep you and your team heading in the same direction, but is also useful for “justifying” digital activity.
#2: Decide What “Success” Is
Too often, organisations have badly-thought-out notions of “success”. Measuring success is easy in a profit-making organisation: leads, conversions, sales – etc. For everyone else, it’s often much harder. Strangely, our organisations often then fall back on “virtual visits” as the metric of choice, ignoring things which can be better indicators of engagement and success.
#3: Use Google Analytics
There’s italics on “use” on this one for a reason. L0ts of organisations have installed GA and use it a bit – but few actually use it properly to try to understand how users are engaging with their content. This is hardly surprising given the huge and sometimes baffling amount of information the system offers you, but nonetheless something to focus on.
#4: Have a Social Media Strategy, Not Just A Presence
In the particular context of this conference, almost all of the organisations represented had a fairly strong presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter and so on. But few of them (and this is very common) had a sense of why. Social Media needs thinking about strategically in order for it to succeed in the longer term – and it needs to fit with your strategy and purpose. Sometimes this means not doing it!
#5: Be Aware Of How Your Organisation Fits
This one covers a whole range of stuff, from user testing to things like keyword monitoring and feed-reading. You can’t hope to market your content if you don’t understand the trends, people and technologies of your environment.
#6: Use A Dashboard
This one is for all the “I’m too busy to do all this stuff” people out there. Using a dashboard (for me, it’s a combination of Netvibes and Google Reader) saves a huge amount of time when it comes to monitoring all this activity. The Google Analytics dashboard is the same – use these tools to radically reduce the noise and replace it with signal.
#7: Build Internal Knowledge
Building knowledge within your organisation is often forgotten. Let people know what you’re doing – whether you’re talking about marketing activities, ways of measuring success or wider strategic goals. Send a monthly “KPI” emailing, have a “lunch and learn” session – do whatever it takes to keep people in the loop and break down those organisational silos. If you do this regularly you’ll start to understand what the barriers are and how to remove them – and you’ll probably get some interesting ideas from others about how to improve what you do as well.
#8: Fail Quickly: Be Iterative
It’s as true in marketing as in anything else: try stuff, see what works – build on what does work, kill off what doesn’t. Use things like multivariate testing to rapidly tweak on the fly and then use this knowledge the next time you launch a campaign, send a mail shot or whatever.
#9: Understand Search
Search is a powerful web traffic driver, but it needs to be understood in the context of SEO, “Search Intention” and other factors. Do what you can to get up to speed with how content and links can improve your search engine rankings, and what this means to your traffic and auciences.
#10: Share!
Talk to people at other similar organisations and ask them what they’re doing. Find out what works, what doesn’t, and why. Set up a monthly meeting to discuss your web stats and campaigns, or put together a discussion mailing list. Your peers are probably going to be the single best source of information – use them!
That’s it.
What do you think? How do you join up your digital activity in strategic ways in your organisations?
[slideshare id=6090989&doc=developingyourdigitalstrategyppteduformatting-101209093311-phpapp02]
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