Today's Digital White Waters

There’s a technical term in whitewater rafting called a “boof”. When rafting, whitewater indicates an obstacle that can be a challenge to pass through. When you see water rolling around, the human tendency is to avoid it. But when you do that in a kayak, you turn over, meaning leaning away from the problem actually is the problem.

So the correct technique is to go right at the white water to fly over the obstacle and use it as thrust to go fast.

This is a great metaphor for what it means to take on these challenges in digital marketing. Rather than work around the problem, turn the problem into a differentiating advantage.

So get ready to “boof” some of the obstacles digital marketing faces today.

THE MARKETING IT EXPLOSION

One thing that’s obvious is the explosion in types of marketing tools, from chat to geo-targeting to lead generation forms and so on. It’s clear that in the future there will be more of these types of services, not fewer.

Within each marketing category, services are getting more specialized and complicated. This implies that there’s only going to be more types of marketing tools and integrations, which can be very hard to manage and have resulted in intensified competition due to the better competitive tools arms race.

Platforms are trying to tackle this problem by offering to do everything for you. However, being able to do everything on one platform isn’t the future of digital marketing. Ask yourself, “How do I take it to the next step from basic integration to doing something custom with that integration?” For instance, taking these specialized marketing IT tools and integrating them into something unique.

PERSONALIZATION

From the film “Minority Report”

Personalization is a trend that’s gaining rapid momentum. But how do you persuade your clients of its importance? Sometimes your clients aren’t convinced as to why they should invest in something that’s highly personalized. It’s important to convey to them that conversions will go up when you’re specific and personalize content based on information you can gather about your customers (say from AdTech).

Therefore, in terms of technology, this means your website has to collect and manage data. To be personalized, you have to draw upon a lot of data sets. You must be able to access all this data in real-time too.

BRANDS AS PUBLISHERS

In the 90s, brands were told to get on the internet. “It’s the future,” they were told without really any other explanation. You weren’t able to say, “you need to get online because Amazon is going to happen … or Google’s going to happen … or social media is going to happen.” We didn’t know any of these things, but we knew this was the future.

Today, the equivalent to getting online is giving your brand publishing agility. Content should be the centerpiece of marketing. People on Facebook share content, not home pages.

The obstacle here is being good at publishing…many brands don’t specialize in this area, so it’s a challenge to go above and beyond to make your brand stand out from a publishing perspective.

Those who don’t publish will not only stand still, but they’ll fall behind.

INTRAPRENEURSHIP

When you think like an entrepreneur in the context of a bigger company, that’s called intrapreneurship. There is so much unknown and it’s hard to plan for the unknown or how things will unfold. One of the ways you deal with this uncertainty is to act or think more like a startup that also doesn’t know anything about their customers, their products, or their market.

What you do is you run experiments. Acknowledge that you aren’t sure how to use certain technology and that you need a technology platform that is flexible and lets people move quickly when they want to.

Secondly, you need to be flexible and creative because it doesn’t matter what the technology is doing, it’s the campaigns and creative inside there that actually counts.

Thirdly, you need to be able to run tests quickly and cheaply so you can try things, learn, and figure out what’s working.

This notion of intrapreneurship is more than just nice, it’s mandatory when you’re navigating a world where it’s not exactly clear what the right answer is.

TO BOOF OR NOT TO BOOF?

What are the answers to some of these obstacles? Let’s take a look…

TECHNOLOGY CAN’T REPLACE HUMAN CREATIVITY

It doesn’t matter what the technology is if the creative isn’t there — at the same time, if you have the best ideas in the world, but it costs 50 thousand dollars and two months for a test campaign, that also won’t work.

The relationship between technology and creativity is a marriage — you have to have both the technology platform to support these activities, along with non-A.I. humans to drive the creative strategies and do so in a way that’s cost efficient.

WHAT’S NEEDED FROM TECHNOLOGY TO EXPLOIT THE RAPIDS TO YOUR BENEFIT?

To attack these sorts of challenges, here’s what you need from technology:

Scale

A solution that already runs at scale, meaning globally. Your content should be able to be reached from all over the world and cater to different languages, etc. But also, in a technology sense, say something goes viral and you get tens of millions of hits in a day; your site should be able to handle this volume of traffic without crashing.

Agility

Agile = fast. You have to be fast to be entrepreneurial at all of these things.

Right Cost

Not everything is cheap, obviously. Yet, simple things ought to be easy and they should be cheap. Complex things are not cheap, yet they are possible.

Integration

As data sources continue to expand, being able to easily and quickly connect and access all that data is essential.

WHY WORDPRESS?

WordPress is actually perfectly suited to take on these particular obstacles.

Here’s how WordPress addresses these challenges:

Size

WordPress powers more than a quarter of the web and 60 percent of the CMS market share. It also powers 27 percent of the top 10K websites.

Agility

Here’s an example: When Google Glass came out, by the next day there were three free WordPress plugins that you could use that would take your content and make it available in Glass. This means that you and your clients are in control of the when and how to go and apply this new technology.

It’s the control and power to go at the rate that’s appropriate for you and your clients…that’s agility.

Right Cost

The WordPress software is free and so are many plugins and themes. Sometimes it’s not about making the budget smaller, but rather making the value bigger.

Ask yourself “what are you spending the money on?” Are you spending it on software licensing fees? This doesn’t make a project more successful. Or are you spending it on making a better project or a more effective campaign which generates more value?

Integration

WordPress is open source and has 30,000-plus people working as freelancers whose primary income comes from WordPress. The fact that all this exists makes it easy to make integration points. Since it’s open, you can take whatever somebody else did and customize it to the integration you want, making it that much easier.

THE CATCH…

WordPress is free like a puppy dog is free. It’s not actually free. Just like you have to give a puppy shots and keep it fed, WordPress comes with maintenance tasks too.

There are three vital pieces to taking an open source project and making it an enterprise-grade platform. This includes high performance, security, and service.

High performance means having a platform that is architected to deliver strong uptime and robust performance for your mission-critical enterprise sites. It means being able to handle traffic spikes, planned or unplanned, and getting to the magic number of a sub 3 second load time.

Security is also another important piece to an enterprise-grade website. As technology evolves, the number of security attacks will not lessen in the future, they’ll only increase. That’s why it’s important to invest in an enterprise-grade solution that hardens your WordPress site against potential threats.

Another component to being enterprise-grade is having access to great service. It means caring just as much about the customer service experience they receive, as the quality of the product or service you’re selling. In most businesses, return customers and word-of-mouth are what will make you successful. When customers feel respected and their feedback is listened to, they recommend you to other potential customers and they return as repeat customers.

The question facing marketers and agencies today, is whether or not to boof. Will you lean into the problems and accelerate your growth?