Why giving people time speeds up digital decision making

I’ve been working in digital marketing for close to a decade now and, let me tell you from experience, the speed in which everything moves is unreal.

It’s proper blink and you’ll miss it territory. One year search was king and email was dead on its feet. Then you had to optimise for mobile or you’d lose potential precious leads. Then social entered the mix, and content marketing was on the rise last year.

Now, suddenly, some are warning against a content overload and advising to keep faith in email. Oh, and keep a keen eye on marketing automation, too!

Finding the right advice

A lot of these sentiments can be good advice, depending on who you listen to, but to me it underlines the essentials of having a solid digital strategy. To listen to only the advice that’s relevant to your business, using the marketing channels that you need, and planning ahead with the tools that will boost your business.

I’ve learnt a lot of experience during my time in the digital marketing industry, and nothing has been more valuable to me than the mistakes made while at larger companies. Why? Because at times the companies I worked for would create a new department because a new marketing channel had appeared.

Social media’s the next big thing? We’d better invest in social and get some guys in that know about Facebook. Only, in a company of 80+ people, it doesn’t really work as smoothly as that…

The most valuable piece of advice I can give to medium-sized and larger companies is, no matter what you’re recruiting for, you need give people a lot of time to acclimatise to the culture of a company and integrate their ideas into your overall strategy.

If you’re investing in somebody and their ideas, then surely you’ve mulled over it and considered where they fit in?

Making the most of your team 

Larger companies are typically slower to adapt to shifts in the digital landscape because of their size and the different demands of various departments. To this end there are a number of different tools you can make use of help speed things up; BaseCamp is an especially effective tool for SEO while Sprout is excellent for organising social campaigns.

Invest wisely and there’s no reason why all your marketing efforts can’t be brought in-house at a more affordable cost than outsourcing. If you’ve ever been with an agency and had monthly reports then what are they really saying to you? How useful is the data really, especially if you’re paying for your reports?

The bottom line from my experience is to educate and innovate rather than expecting instant results and wasting time with impatience. An investment in the right person and consolidating your strategy to streamline internal communications over the long-term is more effective than throwing money at marketing.

The speed of change within the industry is my case in point. Instead of lumbering to catch up, you should look to strategise internally, hand the reigns to brilliant minds and give them time to shine. Contact us today for further details.