Digital marketing is a highly reactive industry, where plans are often tweaked and adapted in response to positive or negative feedback. This feedback is usually found via analytics, which can vary depending on the channel. For example, Google Analytics is excellent for tracking activity on a website, monitoring user behaviour, engagement and acquisition. The reports generated by GA are often used by digital marketers to assess the effectiveness of their campaigns and strategies.
This is essentially a form of reflection, and gives digital marketers the ability to identify what is working well and what isn’t. Without reflecting on strategies, campaigns may quickly become stale, leading to a deterioration in their impact and success. Basically, reflection in digital marketing is extremely important and here we discuss the reasons why.
Innovation
Reflecting on previous work and experiences can be the source of inspiration and innovation for new ideas. Adapting specific campaigns that were previously successful to fit new styles and ideas helps to keep future campaigns fresh and unique, but with a strong foundation. There is an element of risk that comes from any new digital marketing strategy or campaigns, so pulling from past experiences can help mitigate this risk.
Creativity is a major part of digital marketing, and creative content often provides innovative designs and campaigns. Of course, there is a lot of technical and quantitative analysis involved, where statistics are used as evidence for success. However, being creative is equally important and requires a lot of time and careful planning to produce content and campaigns that stand out. Compiling creative ideas happens with lots of time, experience and reflection.
Knowledge is power
Reflecting on previous campaigns and strategies will help to build knowledge. This knowledge can be used to build future content plans, carry out research more effectively and create better content. Digital marketing consists of many channels which all require different management and tactics. It’s impossible to instantly master them all, and mistakes will be made. It’s how the mistakes are learned from, rather than hidden from, that’ll lead to more successful digital marketing results.
Examples of how reflection can lead to improvements isn’t unique to digital marketers themselves, but also the tools used by them. There are constantly new programmes and tools being introduced to the digital marketing landscape each with the aim of improving upon their competition. The major platforms release updates that keep them evolving and competitive, where reflections are made and used to innovate – from simple changes that had big impacts such as Twitter increasing the character limit to 280, to complex changes that revolutionised digital marketing like Google’s major algorithm updates affecting SEO for years to come.
Don’t hide from mistakes
Possibly the most important reason for reflection in digital marketing is the opportunity it provides to learn from mistakes. Naturally this can apply to learning what was successful as well, however avoiding campaigns or strategies that actively didn’t work and led to negative results is critical. It’s also important to track previous content and its analytics regularly. As mentioned at the beginning, digital marketing is highly reactive where fast-paced decisions are required to stay competitive and ensure success. This further emphasises the need to identify mistakes or underperforming content and learn from it.
Conclusion
Reflection in digital marketing is a key part of the industry, for people and organisations at all levels. With the amount of analytics available to digital marketers, it is best practice to monitor and track performances regularly, allowing for the greatest chance to react, adapt and create the highest quality and most relevant content possible. We have many years of digital marketing experience and are not embarrassed to admit to mistakes; we pride ourselves on learning from them and aim to produce the best possible content and results for our customers.
About Inflowing
Inflowing is a B2B marketing agency. We help B2B organisations do meaningful things with marketing. Whether that’s getting more leads, more visibility, or supporting their sales teams.
We’re an experienced team of marketers with an incredibly strong background in B2B. To learn more about B2B and improving your marketing, check out our other blogs or get in touch.
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