It is important for digital marketing professionals to avoid the broken clock syndrome. The environment in which you operate is in a continuous state of flux. Your targeted audience, their needs, your competitors, their marketing strategies, and technologies are all continuously changing. In such a situation, it is not safe to leave a proven digital marketing programme unchanged, while the world spins around it.

It may be a challenging and exhausting task, but it is still very important for digital marketing experts to keep themselves updated about changes that could affect the performance of their business. Here are some helpful solutions that can be put to good use.

• Make an outline of trends: It is important to make a note of trends witnessed in audience and customer patterns, especially new customers, for your industry. You can also take a look at competitive spend, and marketing programmes being conducted in your business segment, at least every six months. Compare these trends with the changes displayed by your digital marketing campaign.
• Internal reviews: Conduct regular internal reviews of all digital marketing programmes every six months. If your brand has peak seasons, this review should be conducted months before this period commences.
• Get recommendations: Ask for recommendations that reveal diverse assumptions and cover various time periods. One way of getting this is by asking for a low, medium, or high risk recommendation; or a conservative and aggressive recommendation together with a full rationale.
• Ask your team for recommendations: Smart digital marketing experts ask their team for two sets of recommendations – one that is based on the historical performance of the campaign, and one that is blind to previous statistical data. If you have a big enough team, you can split it into various sections, giving each section different sets of info and assumptions, for them to base their recommendations on.

The main objective of these exercises is to determine clear goals, and help motivate your team towards continuously improving the performance of your digital marketing strategy. It is also important to conduct external audits periodically, to obtain an expert opinion without any bias. It can help in a thorough analysis of your campaign, and prevent closeted thinking.

In many cases, such optimisation is achieved through a change in leadership, which explains why most CMOs working in digital marketing companies have an average tenure of only around 18 months.

While most digital marketing professionals continue to collect and store information about the historical performance of their campaigns, it is time they also learn that they cannot depend on this data, solely. If we want our strategy to succeed over the long term, it is important to stop looking backwards, and develop new plans with the future in mind.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency, and can be contacted on 0845 388 5583 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.