Seth Godin has a tremendous attribute… whatever he writes translates perfectly to the digital marketing arena. In his latest, fantastic blog article, The Hierarchy of Success he discusses the key factors in relation in defining success;
- Attitude
- Approach
- Goals
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Execution
More often than not, this sequence is heavily weighted to the final 2 factors, Tactics and Execution. ‘Why do we need to run a social media campaign? Lets give it a shot….’ , no time to develop Goals or a defined Strategy, all the time is placed upon, predominantly, execution.
Generally, Execution, is when money is spent, when results are analysed and where results are determined.
As Seth points out, at what stage do you ask “Why are we doing this?“, “What do we want to achieve?“. You may hear from your Head of Marketing, ‘We’ve launched our facebook application…‘ – at what stage was their a strategy and attainable goal structure put in place?
The key element to any Digital Marketing foray is to understand the reason why you are allocating rare resources such as spare marketing budget and spare time into a new project. Without this understanding, you are working with an ad hoc mentality which may just or may not succeed.
Once your Attitude is defined and outlined, next determine your approach, if this is new forefront technology your approach may well be to ‘suck it and see’. At least, understanding this from the outset gives you a greater awareness of how your goals and results will be determined and achieved. Your attitude may be one of ‘prove me wrong’ when it comes to adding additional budget to your adwords campaign on the whim of a colleague…. if so, you now know how to define your approach.
Maybe you need to provide further research in order to offer a new SEO strategy? Keyword analysis, competitor analysis and the level of investigation needed are all part of Approach, which leads to the development of your Goals.
Time is a truly limited resource for any successful online marketeer. Spending more time building your overall methodology relating to the ranking of the 6 criteria above and less on the execution (with the inevitable post-launch tweaks and changes) will lead to greater results, greater opportunities and a greater working pattern.
