Digital Marketing Strategy, General
Focus on Prioritizing Digital Marketing For Big Impact
Aug 22 2023
There are no easy answers to how to focus on prioritizing digital marketing, but there are two models, Hero, Hub, & Hygiene and Investment/Impact that you can use to help prioritize your digital marketing spending for big impact.
The first method you can use to prioritize your spending is Hero, Hub, and Hygiene. This model is adapted from the Google content model.
Consider the digital marketing activities you are thinking of executing and categorize them as Hero, Hub, or Hygiene. Different businesses may place different activities under each category – it depends on the size of your business, your customer expectations, and your digital maturity.
What it is:
Hygiene activities are those that you have to do as a respected business. For a digital marketing business, this could be website maintenance, social media account basics, etc.
How much effort:
For established businesses, hygiene should take up about 20% of your digital marketing efforts. Less established businesses may spend more time and effort.
How to approach it:
Your goal with hygiene activities should be to complete them as efficiently as possible with good execution. It can’t be awful or embarrassing for your business, but it doesn’t need to be the best or most expensive execution. For example, if you sell a beauty product at a retailer, you need a website. You don’t need the best website, but you need a good website that looks professional and represents your business well.
What it is:
Hub activities are proven strategies that will grow your business. These are the things that you know work, or they typically work for your industry or business. These are the digital marketing activities that drive your business forward. This is the area that generates the most ROI for your business. By continuing to improve and optimize proven strategies, your business will grow over time.
How much effort:
For established businesses, hub activities should represent 60% – 70% of your marketing efforts. Many businesses tend to move on after implementing something. Once it is running, they move to the next. Instead, stay focused on growing your results to maximize your ROI.
How to approach it:
The goal of Hub activities is to optimize and improve your execution and results. For example, if you are already running Facebook ads and getting results, spending time optimizing and improving your ads will grow your return on investment. The focus here is on improvement. In a rapidly evolving digital space, businesses must continue to invest in proven working strategies to continue their success and create big impact.
What it is:
Hero activities are your innovation activities. They are the new things that aren’t yet proven. These could be different for every business. For example, LinkedIn ads are well established, but if my business hasn’t used them yet, these would be a Hero activity.
How much effort:
Hero innovation content should take up 10% – 20% of your efforts, depending on your digital maturity. Since innovations usually don’t have well-established best practices, and you don’t have experience with them, yet they often take more investment to set up and run.
How to approach it:
The goal of Hero activities is to move them into the hub. This means clear KPIs and targets with the ability to experiment and test to determine what works. The objective is to test and learn and establish what works so that a Hero activity can either be stopped or moved into the Hub. It is important to remember that your return isn’t guaranteed with Hero activities, so you want to limit your investment, as there is a better chance that they fail than succeed.
Check out this FREE Digital Marketing Strategy Toolkit for more ways to focus on prioritizing your digital marketing for big impact!
While your hygiene activities may be a given, you will likely have more Hub and Hero activities than resources available. The next tool at your disposal to focus on prioritization of your digital marketing is Investment Impact.
When calculating the investment and impact of your activities, be sure to give your best estimates. Consider all the costs, issues, efforts, and how many people could be reached or converted by your efforts. Remember, the goal is to focus on prioritizing big impact!
Graph all of your activities based on Investment/Impact, and you’ll find they fall into one of four quadrants: Time Drains, Big Bets, Low-Hanging Fruit, and ROI Center. To focus your prioritization in digital marketing for big impact, you need to have low investment and a high impact. If your investment falls in the Time Drains quadrant-DROP IT.
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Prioritizing digital marketing for significant impact involves using two models: Hero, Hub, & Hygiene and Investment/Impact. The Hero, Hub, & Hygiene model categorizes digital marketing activities into three segments. Hygiene includes essential tasks like website maintenance and social media basics, requiring about 20% effort for established businesses. Hub activities are proven strategies driving business growth, representing 60-70% of marketing efforts. These activities deliver high ROI and should be continuously optimized. Hero activities are innovative, high-impact endeavors, often tailored to specific campaigns. Proper prioritization depends on business size, customer expectations, and digital maturity, focusing on maximizing ROI for sustained growth.