My work means that I help clients create Digital Marketing Strategies - either through advising them on training or sitting down with them and working out the detail of the actual strategy. So often I see the temptation to view some new, exiting application and want to sign up for it and apply it straight away. You've seen a competitor has a blog and another a Twitter account and feel that in order to keep up with them that you should do so to.
Well, hang fire!
Some of these tools may, or often may not, fit in with the digital marketing or social media strategies of these organisations but may not for yours. A couple of days back Seth Godin wrote an article - when tactics drown out strategy - and said:
Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don't feel confident outlining one unless we're sure it's going to work. And the 'work' part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, "I'm going to post this." If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)
He further goes on to say that:
"Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time" is a strategy. Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics. In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy... and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.
So, next time you see an article on Mashable about some new Web 2.0 application or a report from the Guardian about the top social media tools for business, pause and ask yourself whether it fits into your overall digital marketing strategy. If you don't have a digital marketing strategy, you know what you have to do!
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