What actually goes into good digital marketing?
Let's not talk about servers, and code, and websites, and dashboards, and analytics, and SEO/SEM/SMO, AI, Big Data, NLP, CMS, and all of the acronyms, and please hold yourself back from burning me at the stake for just a little while.
Let's talk about the art of digital marketing.
Trust me, it's an art. All the acronyms and certifications you collect along the way are the building blocks, and legos can be used to build a basic wall or a soaring piece of art - it's all about the vision that goes into putting them together, just right.
After a point, it's in understanding -
- People. What skillsets do you need in your team? Do the people you interview have them, will they be able to work with the rest? Can their ambitions be fueled, directed, and grown along the best possible paths to keep them in the team, happy, synergizing off each other and not ditching you for the next available opportunity? People are not replaceable cogs in digital; their experience and skill is half the requirement. The other half of knowing the system and the process takes months to train and is a huge opportunity cost if lost.
- Prioritization. The digital space is an ocean of Shiny New Things, a storm of buzzwords each more seductive than the rest, and among them stalk vultures who will not hesitate to promise how each one will cure all your ills and fix your woes and raise your kids right and wash your windows. But newest, latest, and best-rated isn't necessarily right for you; You have to be able to identify and select what the problem is and what will actually solve it.
- Pressure. Digital tech is a lot like plumbing - as long as you do your job right and it all runs smoothly nobody notices. Then one day - usually Friday afternoon - quite possibly for no fault of yours, or equally possibly precisely because you got complacent - a pipe clogs, the shit hits the fan and the world is shrieking how this is the biggest disaster to befall the earth since Chicxulub. At that point, you're going to have to roll up your sleeves and pull together something extraordinary across your people, agencies, bloody-minded technology, data, and time, and make magic happen.
- Perception. Ever been driving peacefully until you picked up a small, weird sound in the engine you just can't ignore? A nagging headache, a tic, a tiny inconsequential noise in the dark of night that somehow you just know means there's something big and bad prowling around under the surface? With all technology there's automation and logical rules... and those always have cascading effects, unintended chain reactions, escalating domino collapses till things go boom. Technology will follow the letter of the law; the spirit is irrelevant. So, if your intuition can pick up that tiny little tell, and your imagination can visualize what disastrous outcome that eventually means - you have an opportunity to jump in and fix it before it explodes. Which brings me to the last point...
- Persistence. You're going to have to dig, and dig, and keep digging until you find the problem, the budget, the right candidate, tuning and fine-tuning the right plan. You're not looking for perfection; just performance. Testing and retesting, optimizing, upgrading, upskilling all the time.
So, here we are; a little perspective from the other side. It's this part of digital marketing that gets me out of bed and look forward to each day. It's tough, it's hard, it can hurt, but it's also enormous fun, and I'm lucky I had a chance to do this.
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