3-Step Process to Escape the Tinkering Mentality and Enter a Comprehensive Digital Strategy

Greetings Degurgitators! It's been a minute, hasn't it? I've had a few things going on outside of the professional life that's kept me busy. One of the greatest things happening to me is that my oldest is starting Kindergarten. I'm beyond a blessed dad. 

But let's get right into it. I want to talk about how to escape the tinkering mentality of your website. Those onesie-twosie things you think that are just going to raise conversion rates just might not be what you think will happen. I'm not saying that certain small changes won't help exactly, but often times those types of changes happen with testing around a specific goal.

How does this happen?

This often happens when thorough objectives, goals, and measurement strategy isn't really there. I'll often hear that the goal is to "make more money" or to "sell more **blank**". That isn't rooted in any specific strategy. What's more difficult is that it's hard to figure out if whatever you did in the first place actually led to the improvement. There is no effective strategy rooted in the objectives of the business without a measurement model to review efforts in place - a key miss to any business looking to get better in digital marketing.

What do you need to do to move past this?

Here are the steps I take to get everyone on the right track to effective digital strategy:

1) Digital Measurement Model: I'm not going to get into the weeds of it, but you need to read this excellent piece by Avinash Kaushik regarding his model - I use it all the time and I love it. In a nutshell, consider the purpose of your business, organize specific objectives, set goals to those objectives, decide how you want to measure said objectives, and finally, make sure your customer segments are specifically looked at to ensure things are moving in the right direction.

2) Organization of Activities: After you have designed the measurement model you still have specific activities and projects that you will need to develop over the course of a quarter (I recommend quarter, as it is a finite time period where it won't be difficult to pivot) to ensure you meet your goals. For example, if your goal is to "improve conversion rate" for the objective of increasing overall transactions, then a project might be to A/B test your order processing steps. If you add a "check out as guest" option (obvious miss if you don't do this), then you should also have custom reporting to show how this is doing specifically, along with your overall KPIs developed in the model. This is just one project/activity you are doing, but as you have multiple you will need to organize and schedule them accordingly per each objective. Also, if you are as neurotic as I am, I would annotate these in your analytics reports so you can see the performance.

3) Review progress: Last but not least, review all of your data month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, and the same month last year based on the digital measurement model. This ensures that you are moving in the right direction in a meaningful, comprehensive way. 

There it is, folks. Escape a potential subjective reality you might be living in and enter into an objective one that aligns with the pieces that will improve your business.