Long gone are the marketing days of batch and blast email campaigns. Throw some copy and graphics together with a collateral taste treat. The new age digital marketing champions must cater across channels, devices and content formats to the specialized needs and wants of their audience. They also need to respond effectively to a sales team clamouring for qualified leads. Tight rope walking is a neat trick, but all it takes is one slip. One drop in quality.

It could be spelling errors, grammar, language localization, skewed images, bad stock pictures, incorrect design elements, deviation from corporate brand guidelines, non-responsive email. Those are a few things that can go wrong in a single email. And digital marketing now includes email marketing, marketing automation, web development, analytics, and paid acquisition including social, media, PPC/SEM, SEO and content marketing.

A drop in quality can mean:

• unrepairable damage to the brand
• losing out on business in real time
• giving your competitors an edge over you

Quality Assurance Processes are your best protection in the face of the accelerating velocity of digital technology adoption. Quality Assurance Processes help you stay out ahead of the rapid pace of digital transformation of business models. Here are three basic examples.

Quality Drop #1: Poor Strategy and Planning

Lack of planning results in a poor strategy, and the execution that follows results in a #marketingblooper. Understand your market. Understand your target audience and your channels. Fine-tune your messaging and positioning. Beware of cultural and language nuances.

Quality Check

Planning must involve all stakeholders. The planning review must pass through multiple layers of people before it is executed. A robust review process is usually all that is needed to avoid a #marketingblooper.

“Few things hurt a brand more than an accusation of racism. So even though it’s impossible to tell if this tweet from Home Depot was indeed racist or simply stupid, the fact that the Twittersphere was up in arms over it made corporate delete the tweet, apologize for two days, and fire the social media agency responsible.” Business Insider

Quality Drop #2: Lack of Policy and Processes

Without basic marketing policy and processes the marketing team may as well be blind-folded when it comes to day-to-day execution of tasks.

Quality Check

Put a few basic policies in place for all marketing teams:

• Brand guidelines, colour palette and corporate style guide
• Social media, public relations and external communication policy
• A process to handle all external communication with various stakeholders like Public Relation firms, Analyst Relation firms, media, social influencers, industry experts, etc.

Image Source

Quality Drop #3: Implementation and Execution

“Every marketer makes a mistake.” – All Marketers

Mistakes can range from a simple typo or grammatical error to sending out an email for a new mobile app download which is not mobile-responsive.

Quality Check

For content:

• spelling, grammar, sentence construction, language (e.g. UK and US English is very different)
• all critical information is present and accurate
• titles, headers, and call to action buttons all labelled correctly

For collateral:

• design consistency – check the graphics and layout
• image quality – use appropriate images
• alignment of all design elements
• brand compliance for colour accuracy, typography, etc.

Responsive design:

• check on different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE)
• check on different versions of the browsers
• check on different devices (form factors – smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.)

This is just the first pass at a very deep, very important issue.

Watch this space for more on quality assurance in the digital marketing world. We will come back with a deep dive into the rigorous Quality Assurance Processes we follow at Position² to ensure there is no compromise on the quality of deliverables for our client partners.

Use the comment box below to share your best practices or a #marketingblooper.