So far, our Smart People Saying Smart Stuff series has shown us the components to effective media relations and creating content people care about. For part three, we discussed a topic that many of us struggle with: creating a proficient online marketing platform.
For many marketing teams out there, a nimble platform is something we all dream of, but rarely achieve. Fortunately for us, we have professionals out there like PGi’s Jason Cooper, marketing technology manager, who shows us that our dreams can become a reality.
While there’s no one way to create the ideal online marketing platform, Jason shared a few ideas on areas where he feels marketers can easily increase their online marketing platform reach without having to drastically increase their level of work. Check out three of Jason’s top marketing platform tips.
Focus on Developing Global Templates
Far too often, marketing operations/automation teams can find themselves overrun with various templates and landing pages. They have a somewhat similar look/feel, but are not truly consistent across the enterprise. This is especially true in larger corporations, which may have more than one coder/designer.
To ensure consistency, Jason suggests focusing on developing a handful of global templates that can be easily updated to meet unique needs. Proceeding in this fashion maintains the brand integrity and also provides design and coding teams with a template from which they can start building, leading to more project efficiency and minimizing the need to build a campaign from scratch.
Additionally, by building everything from the global templates, you can easily make enterprise-wide page changes by merely adjusting these templates and have the updates push out to all pages using the template.
Centralize Your Assets
A second component to creating a nimble online marketing platform is to ensure you have a centralized repository for your various assets, including logos, images, content, stylesheets and more. Centralizing these various assets not only allows you to easily and efficiently manage your inventory, but also brings ease to global resource updates when all external links point to a single source.
Two asset repositories to consider are within your online marketing platform or on the backend of your website. For some of our clients, I’ve suggested using one’s online marketing platform for the ease that it provides in managing these assets as well as the ability for most platforms to easily revise existing assets.
Rely on Outside Support Tools
You aren’t just limited to what is within your online marketing platform. In fact, creating an agile environment often requires the use of outside tools, which bring additional functionalities that cannot be addressed through your platform.
A few tools to explore include:
- Google Tag Manager – To globally add/remove code to your pages
- BrowserStack – To test your pages across all browsers
- Litmus – To test your emails across various email providers
Adding these tools to your marketing arsenal enables a flexible working environment while also improving your quality of work.
This is Just the Beginning for Marketing Platforms
As I mentioned at the start of this blog, Jason’s suggestions are just are just a few of many possible approaches to creating a proficient environment. The reality is that there are numerous ways you can create nimbleness within your marketing platform and I welcome other comments/suggestions on the approaches that have worked for you.
Likewise, for more marketing tips, I encourage you to check out our other entries in our Smart People Saying Smart Stuff series.
Smart People Saying Smart Stuff Part 1: Jen Martin
Smart People Saying Smart Stuff Part 2: Justin Grimsley
