digital marketing

2017-07-172017-07-21

Just get moving: Overcoming digital paralysis

moving-day I’ve finally up and moved. Welcome to my new home here at WordPress. And, apologies for being out of touch for so long.

See, when I started this blog back in 2010 over at Typepad, that platform was all kinds of modern and full-featured. But, digital years are like dog years. Seven years later, my non-mobile responsive site on a limited-access platform wasn’t looking so new and shiny anymore.

I knew I had to migrate the blog over here. I just never seemed to get around to it. Despite being in the industry for fifteen years, my actual technical skills are fairly limited. I’ve set up WordPress blogs before, and I knew how easy it was to fall down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to do those million things right, from design to functionality to site admin. The actual work involved felt daunting. Because I never felt like I had enough time to finish the task, I never actually started it.

I’d fallen into the classic digital paralysis trap: Because I couldn’t do everything, I stopped myself from doing anything. Which is why it’s been nearly two years since my last post.

Oops.

The thing is, plenty of companies suffer from digital paralysis, too. The rate of change in digital is too fast for most corporations to keep up.

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2011-10-312017-07-21

A portfolio approach to digital planning

How much money should you be allocating to each channel in your marketing mix?

One simple answer is that you should calculate the ROI of each channel and then shift your budget from the less profitable channels into the more profitable ones. But, even leaving aside various challenges with measuring ROI across a multitude of digital and offline channels, this approach is problematic even assuming you could get accurate numbers. It fails to take all sorts of factors into account, such as the value of emerging channels versus established ones, the difference between awareness marketing and lead generation, and the impact of one channel on another to create a sum greater than its parts.

But the opposite approach — not measuring at all, but simply planning budgets by instinct or by what “feels” right, is even worse. If you have no idea how your various tactics are performing, then you’re flying blind. And as demonstrating ROI becomes increasingly important for marketers, there’s no way that such a laissez-faire way of planning is going to work for very long.

It occurs to me that we need a different approach — one that takes a holistic view of multiple channels and tactics, and drives towards a common goal, but which allows for different performance objectives for each tactic.

Such an approach exists. Our friends in the financial planning industry have been using it for years. They call it portfolio planning.

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