Auditing Marketing Tactics

This content was originally featured in the August 9, 2023 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2023/08/inbox-insights-august-9-2023-auditing-marketing-tactics-generative-ai-for-data/.

Are your marketing tactics out of date?

Trying to keep up with all the changes in technology is daunting, am I right? I know that at least some of you feel this way right now because we’ve talked. You’ve shared your concerns. You’ve acknowledged that you feel like you’re falling behind.

I cannot speak to all your fears, but I can share with you what helps me when things get overwhelming. Go back to what you know best. For me, it’s the 5P Framework. That probably comes as no surprise to you. It’s not just the 5Ps but what I can do with it. I start to bend and stretch it, see what else I can do with it. I know what the 5Ps are, what they can do backwards and forwards. So how do I use what I know to keep moving forward?

I’d be a fool if I didn’t think that AI wouldn’t touch my company, my reporting, my services. Yes, we’ve built our company processes on machine learning but the outputs have remained fairly consistent. We knew that the methods for analyzing digital channel data would change, but the data itself, the channels themselves, were reliable.

Then AI came along. No, it’s not new technology, but the implementations of it are finally picking up speed and becoming mainstream in the marketing industry. Search, Social, Paid, Email, you name it, AI is changing it. So how we do assess if our marketing tactics are out of date?

Let’s start by running them through the 5P framework and see where we land. Why? Because we all want to hit the panic button right now. We all want to shift budgets, cut corners, and get ahead of the pack. None of these things can happen without a plan and we need to slow our breathing. So let’s make a plan, shall we?

As a refresher, the 5Ps are: Purpose, People, Process, Platform, and Performance. Each P is reliant on the others to create a full story. For this exercise, we’ll take a look at our Competitive Analysis report. We designed the report to show you where your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are with your digital marketing. You can read more about it here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/expertise/services/marketing-strategy/digital-footprint-competitive-analysis/

How does the report look if we run it through the framework?

Purpose: The purpose of the report is to understand the digital footprint of your company compared to your competitors.

People: The people that care about this report are you, and any other decision makers.

Process: The process to generate this report is manual. There is a spreadsheet with formulas that someone needs to fill in to generate the report. Now my wheels are turning…let’s keep going.

Platform: The platforms used are numerous. There are a lot of systems needed to extract data. This is likely where you would start the audit. More on that in a second.

Performance: The performance of the report is whether you, the decision maker, has enough information to start making decisions about your tactics.

The 5P Framework told me a lot. I can see the process of generating the report is manual. Perhaps I could look into introducing some automation. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We want to pick apart the platforms that provide the data before automating the data collection.

When I look at the platforms used to create this report, I can see that we need to update them, especially around Search and Social. My next tasks is to figure out what data to remove, and what to replace it with to keep the competitive analysis valuable.

Once I have the platforms updated, then I can look into the process opportunities. From there, I will run the report back through the 5P Framework and see if it still aligns with the purpose.

The point is that when the industry is changing rapidly and things feel like they are spiraling, focus on what you can control.