In the Headlights, April 24, 2019 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

Quick plug: register for our April 30 free webinar on how to measure the right marketing data. We’re down to about 3 seats left.

Sometimes a problem is a blessing in disguise. For the last two weeks, as some of you have noticed and kindly let us know, our newsletter hasn’t been working correctly. The links in past issues simply broke, making them go nowhere except to an error page.

What happened was that the server and system we were using degraded over time until it became unusable. It was a boxed product that failed, and despite our best efforts, we couldn’t keep propping it up. As you saw in your inbox, the system finally came to a graceless halt, like an engine without oil.

What could possibly be the blessing in disguise? Like many entrepreneurial ventures, we set up our marketing automation in the very early days of the company and haven’t made time to make system changes. You may or may not have noticed that we were still sending mail from our old domain name, not the TrustInsights.ai domain. There were a bunch of other issues that were largely invisible to you, but fell under the category of “technical debt” – meaning nagging issues that made things run less optimally.

Over time, technical debt adds up. Marketing runs less well. Measurement becomes less accurate. ROI becomes less clear. Only when you pay off technical debt by keeping systems up to date do you avoid these problems. The challenge for every company is how much debt you allow to pile up before paying it off.

So what’s the blessing in disguise? Our system crash took that choice away from us. Our technical debt in our marketing automation software is now paid off, because we had to rebuild the entire system from scratch, and now that we’re a more established company, we can keep that debt paid off.

We’ve also picked up an important process change; every newsletter issue will also go out as a blog post on the blog, so that if we have issues in the future, there’s still a way for you to get the content you care about. Thank you for your patience and sticking with us.

If you’d like working editions of the past two newsletters, you can get them here:

What’s your takeaway from this? A key question to ask yourself, your team, and your organization is how much technical debt you have. How much is there? How much drag is there on your marketing performance? How much budget and how many resources have you allocated to paying off your technical debt?

In this week’s Bright Idea, we bring you the full session materials from co-founder Christopher Penn’s standing room-only talk at the ContentTech Summit on the AI-Powered Content Marketing Lifecycle. Watch the video replay, get the slides, listen to the audio, and follow along as you learn how AI is powering today’s most advanced content marketing.

Attend the session now!

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Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

InfoShare, May 2019, Gdansk, Poland
NEDMA, May 2019, Boston
MAICON, July 2019, Cleveland
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FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.