digiforce

Too much of digital marketing is reactive.

One day the man calls up and says "I’ve been hearing a lot about jizzerat, that new social media blogging real time local video community that’s getting a lot of traction. What are we doing with that?"

You being the out front marketing person you are quickly reply you’ve been tracking the growth closely and as soon as you nail down the ROI metrics for finance, you’ll be rolling it out across all appropriate business units. Hanging up the phone you type in jizzerat.com to see what all the fuss is about. You then make a note to pull the designer off of the email newsletter that goes out to 650,000 subscribers every Tuesday and have her work up a design for your new jizzerat community page.

That all too common scenario is why we bother developing a strategy. Without one we flap around with every change of the breeze, trying this, forgetting that, and wondering why so little progress comes from all of the activity.

This is especially true in an environment that changes as quickly as digital media. It’s common for a technique that worked well last quarter to be ineffective in this. Fear is the natural response, and we often respond to that fear with a compulsion to try everything to avoid getting left behind.

Innovation is a good thing, and to innovate you have to experiment with something new, but no one has the resources to try everything. With a strategy at least you’ll have some idea of where you’re going and a clue whether jizzerat is something that will help you get there.