As I hurried across the width of campus from my regular class to a lecture I wanted to attend, I kept hoping the opening greetings and introductions would go long. Arthur Henry King, professor emeritus, had come to speak on a topic that was getting a bit of interest around campus. I’d already had to write argumentative papers on the topic in two different classes. It hit at the heart of education and independent thought. The speaker that day needed no introduction. I had heard him talked about throughout my time at the university. Several of my professors had either taken King’s classes or been mentored by him. I slipped into the back just as the person conducting finished his introduction of the speaker. Decades have passed since that lecture, but the central message still comes to mind anytime I start to write or present anything instructive. “If education isn’t about method, it isn’t about anything.”
As I’ve thumbed through the litany of books being churned out on digital marketing. The reason for such a prolific outpouring of content becomes clear. Each book professes to give the reader everything they need to know to get started running digital marketing in their organization. Unfortunately, even though many of the books aren’t very old, they might as well be ancient. They list scores of technologies to use and the best ways to use them. The problem with this prescriptive listing of technologies is that most technologies quickly get replaced by newer, better technologies – sometimes multiple times over. A list of specific technologies to use limits both the usefulness of the book and the digital marketer’s scope innovation.
My background living through the churn of technologies spans decades. I came into digital marketing when we were building websites page by page in just HTML. JavaScript and CSS were in their infancy and seldom used. Advertising was being bought and sold like magazine ads with pricing based on impressions. Although cookies and sessions existed, little infrastructure existed for digital marketers to take advantage of data. Marketing departments might have a webmaster, who could get some help from designers working across both web and print. In short, everything was pretty static. The closest I came to automating a website on that technology was to create a PERL script that combined an HTML template and a CSV content file to build a few hundred pages for an online catalog. The pages were still manually loaded.
Since that time, I’ve watched the industry mature and dozens of promising technologies come and go. Along the way, I’ve tossed out technologies, but hung on to the principles behind their original adoption. The principles were the nuggets of gold plucked from decades of testing, trying, and rebuilding.
I believe the best digital marketing work, the most innovative stuff, is being done by people who push the envelope based on principles. They have a vision of what they want to accomplish and an understanding of the principles at play regardless of technology. They then apply the technology to their advantage.
If you are looking for technical, step-by-step instructions on how to build out a digital marketing machine in your organization, you are looking in the wrong place. You won’t find any cookie-cutter approaches about which technologies to link together or how to configure them. You will find principles for building a lasting, evolving digital marketing machine. You’ll find time-tested strategies and tactics for managing digital marketing processes, and hopefully, you’ll develop a set of habits for evaluating new technologies and approaches in your own digital marketing.
The goal of this book is to give you the foundation to assess circumstances and make decisions about how to build and optimize your digital marketing. Learning about and implementing new technologies is a big part of digital marketing and something you’ll do throughout your career. However, the best marketing organizations I’ve seen aren’t the ones jumping onboard with every new plug-and-play technology, but the ones who use technologies according to foundational principles of sound strategy and tactics.
I also wrote this book for marketing leaders who may not be doing hands on production and creative tasks, but need to understand the foundations that go into good digital marketing practices. I recently spent time with a friend in marketing who explained how her company had engaged a firm whose SEO processes were completely outdated. Outdated to the point of having negative consequences on the company’s organic search. It became clear that if the leadership in her company were practicing the first three principles of intelligence, target, and alignment, they could have better assessed the agency’s proposal and either asked for a revision or gone elsewhere.
Leaders may delegate the investigation of new technologies, but they ultimately have to make decisions. And making those decisions according to time-tested principles greatly improves the odds of choosing wisely.