29 May Keep It Simple Stupid
Sometimes I feel I’m on a personal quest to make the complex simple. I hate dealing with the over complicated and I absolutely believe that complex problems can only really be solved if you can break them down into their component parts. To that end I have, over time, developed a number of guiding principles that help me (and hopefully the teams I work with) get to grips with Digital and do it better.
Here are three of them.
Number one.
Digital marketing is really only about two things. Content and distribution. That’s it. We as digital marketers are in the pursuit of the Holy Grail and it goes something like this.
Getting the right content
In front of the right customer
At the right time
On the right device
At the right point in their decision making process
To drive the right action
It puts content and the customer at the heart of what we do and helps prevent us taking a channel or technology led approach. That’s good. Really good.
Number two.
So, along comes digital, followed by the truly empowered consumer and now a super connected world. It turned everything upside down and our marketing departments and organisations were left in disarray. We’ve come up with a range of different solutions to deal with that problem. Businesses send their staff on training courses and we hire consultants to help us develop the right to-do lists. But in their own right neither of them drive real change. In my mind the formulae for real transformation looks like this;
consultancy + skills development + facilitation = change
That’s the way most of our projects work. The really successful ones anyway.
Number three.
Success in digital is all about people. Never forget it. Things go wrong when you loose sight of the fact that real people are involved. That includes your customers for sure but it also includes your staff and your agency teams. In fact anyone and everyone who is working into the business or project. If you are leading those people your job is really only about three things.
Developing and communicating a clear vision
Getting the right people in the right jobs
Creating the right environment for those people to thrive
There you go. Three guiding principles for doing Digital better.
Clearly there are plenty more. What are you guiding principles?
KISS. Keep it simple stupid. I like that.