Paul Fryer‘s Deep Phat: Digital Marketing with Morals, takes us on a high-level journal into thoughtful and cohesive marketing ideas. Fryer is the digital marketing manager at the Kier Group?plc, a publicly traded property, residential, construction and services group in the UK. This blog will be especially useful if you have marketing responsibilities at a larger integrated AEC business. If not, you’ll still gain really useful insights on how to do things right when digital marketing combines with solid, systematic business processes.
Consider, for example, this post: Test and Learn, where he discusses a?fundamental rule of digital (and for that matter most serious) marketing — you should test, and test some more, and failure in this context is a good thing, because it provides more data on what to do differently next time.
Everyone who has worked in digital marketing must at some time or other failed at a task or campaign. The entire ethos for all good digital marketers is to test and learn and make evidence based decisions and therefore these failures, just like in real life, can teach you more than the successes.
With this in mind, the best thing we can do is mitigate the risk of failure by ensuring all of our activities are as planned and well executed as possible. For example, at Kier we run a company blog which has seen a fair amount of success and has definitely met our original objectives. Without these objectives (an integrated approach, increased organic reach and an improved amount of positive mentions against our competitors) we would have no idea if this task was worthy of our valuable time.
I have seen so many social media accounts simply die a death due to no clear strategy and whilst they are given a lot of focus early on (or as part of a campaign) they are then just left to rot and in the long run actually do more harm to the brand than they ever did good. A neglected social media account says a lot about a company – usually the date the person previously maintaining it handed in their notice!
My latest analogy (those who have worked with me will know I love an analogy!) is that all digital activities/websites are like gardens. Unless you are prepared to continue to build, weed, cultivate and monitor them then there is little point having one in the first place.
He is absolutely correct. I wish I could say I live as well by the principles he implements consistently. (His marketing department has successfully passed an intensive ISO audit). ?He writes:
It’s easy to neglect a lot of very important tasks early on and no doubt we have all been guilty of some of these either through misguided leadership, time and budget constraints:
- A Google Analytics account with no goals/conversions
- Social Media accounts with no objectives, content strategy or monitoring
- Email campaigns that are not integrated into the marketing plan or followed up
- Google AdWords campaigns that are not regularly checked and don’t link to a bespoke landing page
- Print adverts with no performance measurement or call to action
This could be a very long list and it is our job to ensure that nothing goes out the door that isn’t part of a wider marketing plan. Sometimes it may mean asking some difficult questions but without some of the above our efforts will have little chance of the success being measured, being optimised to the maximum valuable insight being gained to prove we have not wasted our time and money.
Fryer’s blog undoubtedly is one of the best and most?professional I’ve seen — and you can see how it integrates with the larger objectives of corporate marketing, social media and business development.
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