An optimised digital marketing nirvana – is it achievable?

5 ideas to help your journey to nirvana

Optimisation, it’s an important and hot topic. Whether SEO, advertising, email or conversion rate. We want more, we have to. Is it possible to reach an ‘optimised’ place, is it ever done, can we ever arrive at an optimised nirvana of continuous optimisation as we suggested in our recent 7 Steps to Digital Nirvana infographic? Whenever I talk to people, and listen to myself talking sometimes, you’d think that we are seeking a destination, a place where it’s all done. We're optimised!

We asked about how optimised businesses are in their digital optimisation in our recent research on managing digital marketing - it's good to see a fair proportion in the top 2 categories, but the majority don't optimise continuously.

My experience is that in reality we never arrive. It’s a little like the idea that, as individuals, we ever reach a state of true happiness - that we’re arrived and done. The reality is that just as life is a journey and happiness is of the moment, so is reaching a perfect state of optimisation and being done. Too much changes around us to make it any other way.

We’re forever dealing with:

• Changing management agendas
• New products and services
• Changes in the market and competitive environment
• Evolving consumer behaviour and technology
• Changes in channel effectiveness (including Google search algorithms)

The reality is that optimisation is a never ending, moving feast. So take heart, we’re all in the same boat.

So what’s the answer?

Accept that this is a moving feast, the world we work in, we’re no longer in a relatively static, advertising led environment, we’re in the business of earning and amplifying consumer attention. It’s important to recognise the complexities of marketing today and not get drowned in it - the truth is we’ve never had so much opportunity to out-wit and out-market the competition irrespective of budget, no excuses. That said, there’s little marketing that can be done to escape a rubbish product or service.

The point here - there's is vast amount of never optimisation to be done.

The optimisation journey

Embrace it! Like happiness, marketing nirvana is of the moment and ever changing, not a destination. Represented in quality ROI, and a quest to better it. Being committed to that cause is why you’ve got a well paid job.

5 techniques to help your journey to nirvana

I know that there’s so much information out there in regard to digital marketing, on this site alone you could drown in it. It all depends where you set your horizon - too low and you can’t see the wood for the trees, to high and you’re likely to trip up. It’s a balance, to address today’s need (usually much more ROI and sales led) with tomorrow’s reality (a vastly changing context for marketing).

• Objectives and filters: You don’t need to optimise everything, in fact the reality of resources and time is that of course you can’t. Instead, define the commercial priorities, they’re useful filters for your focus in marketing and connect you to the business. Using data (commercial and digital) helps to offer the real focus areas and priorities in marketing and again strengthens commercial connections. Next, it’s then useful to have context.
• Strategic planning: Developing a strategy is important for context, it helps realise that there is no one strategy to meet your objectives, I find it liberating and confusing, but then that’s the point and why strategic planning is about revealing those choices. It’s this context for achieving goals that is liberating. It’s again great for connecting with non-marketers, sales people and managers, since it makes marketing much more accessible.
• 90 day tactical plans offer focus: I love 90 day planning, it’s where strategic plans can be translated into relevant, explicit goals, creating a tactical and channel focus and so enabling specialists (social media marketers, SEOs, creatives etc) to adopt the strategic focus for their world, and manage any changes that means for them - more often increases or decreases in budget!
• 70–20–10 and creativity: I’m a big fan of Coca-Cola’s 70–20–10 content marketing model and believe this can be applied across multiple areas of marketing. The idea simply is that 70% of what you invest time and budget in should be safe and known. You then take the remaining 30% and split that into 10% for bleeding edge new ideas and testing, and 20% for where those new ideas need further spend due to interesting new results. I feel that 70–20–10 offers a really useful analogy for optimisation with new ideas, not just deriving more value from the 70%.
• Data and testing: All the above requires a commitment to using data. Of course what you measure is what you focus on so again start with those objectives, translating commercial to marketing. Monitoring and testing is of course the bedrock to ongoing optimisation - see our conversion optimisation hub page for more on the processes and tools.