Focus is key to Digital Marketing Success

“There’s just too much to do!”

Marketers I work with complain of not having enough time to do it all. It’s a complaint I hear again and again.
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Marketing teams and professionals struggle under the pressure of tweeting every day, maintaining a Facebook community, writing blog content, responding to comments on Twitter, finding great images to post to Pinterest, trying to create interesting YouTube videos and the 101 other things they could be doing…

Many feel busy, stressed and swamped by it all.

To make matters worse, not only do they have to conduct their digital marketing, they’ve usually got several other work commitments to meet: such as designing a mailshot that goes out to key clients, chasing the exhibition company who are building the stand at a forthcoming trade show, as well attending company briefings by HR and supervising the Intern...

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Unfortunately, the list of things to do in digital marketing seems to grow by the day…

• Should you use Soundcloud?
• Should you have a Tumblr account?
• What are you going to do with Instagram’s Video functionality?
• Are you going to have an App or not?
• When are you getting the website redesigned for mobile?
• Etc, etc, etc…

The pace of change also causes anxietyThe other complaint I hear is that, ‘it’ all changes so fast!’

As soon as marketing people have got their heads around how Facebook Pages work, Facebook go ahead and change things. Pinterest starts offering private boards and Twitter changes again!

​The stress of modern marketing

The impact of these concerns is emotional and corrosive. People fear that they are somehow falling behind. Everybody else seems to ‘get it’ and understand what to do with all of these tools. There’s a sense amongst many marketing people, that if they’re not using every digital platform available to them, then they must be a failure!

What’s next around the corner anyway?There’s also another fear that there’s probably some new digital platform coming around the corner that will change everything anyway. It seems inevitable to many that a new, as yet unknown and unthought-of online service, is bound come along to upturn the marketing apple-cart all over again!

Exhausting isn’t it?

How you can keep up

How do you manage it all? Indeed, can you or any marketing team do it all?

Yes, you CAN do it all with lots of cash and lots of time - if, of course, you’re a big organisation and have lots of people and resources. You can run several websites, Google Adwords campaigns, Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages and all the rest of them.

Alternatively, even if you’re a small team but are able to commit large chunks of your day to these activities then, again, it is possible to manage lots of different things online.

Most of us need to be more focused

However, if you’re like 99% of organisations, you’ve actually got limited time, money, people and resources. So, with so much you could do, you must, therefore, learn to focus your digital marketing efforts.

Start by asking yourself several questions, such as:

• What are we trying to achieve with our marketing?
• What do we have to produce in terms of tangible results for the business? 
• Are we about ‘getting our name out there’ or are we trying to generate lots of sales leads in the shortest period of time?
• Do we want to slowly build a large online community of customers?
• Or are we looking to target key decision makers in just a select few companies?
  
  

Answering these types of questions can help you choose which activities you should engage in and in which order.

For example, if your business needs orders today then you might want to consider paying for targeted visitors via PPC. You must also focus on driving those visitors on specific offer pages that you can keep tweaking and improving.

Or, if you’re looking to build customer insights from within your industry, then you could consider the long, slow and patient effort of launching and managing a LinkedIn Group or an invite-only Ning group.

What resources do you have?

Another way to focus, is to be realistic about what you can actually achieve.

How much time per day, week or month can you commit to digital marketing? Are you able to give it the time it deserves or, perhaps, should you be asking for more internal support?

Should you outsource activities to external partners and agencies?  Can you realistically do it all or would you be more effective if you paid for some of it to be done for you?

Where are your customers online?You must also have a clear understanding of your target audiences online.

Know your customers

Conduct customer research and check which platforms they are actually using? Which ones do they spend the most time on and which ones are important in their decision-making processes? You might enjoy the creative effort involved in using Pinterest but if your target audiences aren’t (yet?) using it then why are you?

Once you’re clearer about where your audiences spend their time online, then those are the places where you should be focusing your efforts.

Quality content is the best form of focus

Nevertheless, THE best way to focus is not on WHERE you should be online but WHAT you are doing online. If you have limited time then the greatest impact you can have is by spending more of it producing quality content.

Instead of spreading yourself too thinly across multiple websites, focus instead on being helpful online. Spend some serious time and effort producing a really in-depth white paper that your prospects will devour. Go to town on a series of instructive YouTube videos for your key customer groups. Gather together the key web resources in your industry and create a detailed list that you post to your blog.

By focusing on quality content rather than on the quantity of activity, you’ll discover that you don’t need to be everywhere on the Web after all.

If I find a great article you’ve produced, I’ll tweet it for you.

If I stumble across a cool infographic you’ve put together, I’ll email it to my contacts.

And if you produce a gripping series of Soundclouds, then I’ll book mark them and tell my Facebook friends too.

Quality content has always been the way to succeed

From the beginning of Digital Marketing, quality content has always paid huge dividends. Quality content spreads quickly and widely across the Web and jumps from one online platform to another.
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In conclusion then, focus your time, money and resources on doing a few things really well. Lose your anxiety and give your audiences the proper attention it deserves and the Web will return the favour.