The best plan is not the most correct plan. It’s not the one that requires barricading your door, working day and night for a week to write out. It’s the one you stick to.
This logic can apply to diets, preparing a speech, training for competition, or keeping a New year’s resolution. It can also be applied to one thing that is rarely fully implemented – a marketing plan. A great hack to overcome false-starts is to follow a program that’s short enough, you see results in as little as 30 days. And that’s the tactic used in today’s book.
Written in 2019, “Action Tracking” is aimed at formulating a digital marketing strategy. Its author, Katrina German, came by her expertise here in a circuitous way. She’s worked in different media, from books, to television to running a technology company. The common element was that they all centred around communicating stories, and reaching and marketing to the audiences hearing them. She’s been helping companies for the last 6 years. Tying digital actions by sales and marketing to a coherent plan that’s aligned with their strategy.
But this talk isn’t just about scaffolding and building your online strategy. We talk about the drawbacks of current social channels. The issue of social media’s impact on mental welfare was brought to the fore by the 2020 movie “The Social Dilemma.” The platforms knew about their negative impact on audiences before we as marketers did, but now that we are aware, we can’t ignore our impact. When we use sensational headlines so our messages spread further, it ups the ante for all posts to please the algorithm. This degrades everyone’s experience and subjects our followers to mentally-corrosive content. This isn’t the kind of Internet Katrina wanted to see, and so she did something about it. Her most recent reincarnation is as founder of Ethical Digital, a Canadian agency that respects the voices of women and Indigenous and other minority communities. Their belief is that more inclusion in the ranks of marketing practitioners will improve the digital experience for everyone. I can’t argue with her here and I hope you stick around to hear this upbeat tone at the end of our talk.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- Using Ads to test your Headlines, a tactic made famous by Tim Ferris
- Google Analytics Chrome Extension (uses GA3)
- Google Keyword Planner
- Google Trends
- CMSs like Squarespace
- Marketing Automation tools like ActiveCampaign and MailChimp
- Documentary “The Social Dilemma”
- Katrina’s LinkedIn Profile and Twitter profile