“Set and Forget” Digital Marketing

One of the misconceptions about digital marketing is that once you have a program in place, you can automate as much as possible and just forget about it. People think that once the program is running on autopilot, you can simply walk away from it and forget about it.

While having a both a strategy and automation in place are certainly good things, this doesn’t mean you can ignore the program. There is no such thing as a truly automated, “set and forget”, digital marketing program.

You Need to Monitor Results

Firstly, if a digital marketing program is automated, it implies that you don’t need to monitor results. Although the work itself can be automated, such as scheduling social media posts in advance and writing and scheduling in content in advance, this doesn’t mean y0u can truly turn your mind away from the program. You need to consistently monitor results to assess if your efforts are paying off. You can’t let too much time pass before you check on the program.

While we don’t recommend checking in on the results on a daily basis (this is counterproductive), we do believe you need to check on the data on a monthly basis. You should think about your goals and assess metrics such as conversions, overall traffic, organic search traffic, social media engagements and more. The overall goal of digital marketing is to help you grow your business. Metrics that will indicate if this is happening or not should be examined.

Consider Making Tweaks to the Program

If you were to truly “set and forget” your digital marketing, you would have no real way to know if the program were working or not. You need to monitor results and then make decisions about whether or not to adjust certain aspects of the program. However, this can be tricky because you have to give the program enough time to work and to gather data.

Deciding how much time is enough will depend on the nature of the business, the sales cycle, and the industry, business seasonality, but generally you need to give a new digital marketing strategy at least six months to gather data before you actually have enough data to analyze. But, once you see the data, the main goal is to assess if your numbers have an upward trend. You should know by the six month point if the numbers are trending upward.

It’s All About Balance

The main goal is to find a balance between automating as much as you can within the digital marketing program and monitoring results. There are several reasons why you would want to monitor, such as making sure the automation is actually working how it’s supposed to, to assess data, and to eventually make decisions based on the data.

However, it is not a good idea to obsessively monitor. You need to find a balance. Automation can help make your lives easier, but it doesn’t highlight the full picture. You can’t forget about your digital marketing, otherwise you could be leaving money on the table.

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