How to tackle Information Overload in Digital Marketing
What is Information Overload?
Information Overload as the name suggests is the explosion of information in every possible direction.
Information in its massive proportion overwhelms the person on its receiving end.
As a result, instead of gaining knowledge we get caught up in the whirlpool of information overload & don’t learn a thing, and lose the precious time.
Hence it is very very important to organize, categorize, refine, segregate & assign times to the data we are willing to give in all for.
The strategy is the key factor in your combat against information overload. Without a strategy, it is literally like finding the needle in a haystack!
How does Digital Marketing come into the picture?
Digital Marketing right from self-learning to working to accommodating yourself with trends attracts information overload every step of the way.
A newbie who is trying to make a way in this industry out of curiosity & passion will most likely get frustrated with so much information of every single aspect. This also calls for contradiction & chaos.
As a beginner who has embarked on the self-learning journey to get a grip over Digital Marketing, would probably “Google”
Which only makes sense. But Google contains so much data.
Keep reading: Brilliant ways you can use Quora as a tool for Digital Marketing
Let’s take a look at information overload scenario in self-learning journey
If you are to Google “Digital Marketing Tutorial”, it will enlist all the web pages having that article/blog post which is SEO Optimized. This will differ according to your geographical territory.
But the point is that you just need to consume one full-fledged content about Digital Marketing Tutorial that will clear all of your doubts, but there is end number of portals that have published content relating to it. That is what overwhelms you, & soon you begin to lose your mind.
Keep reading: What is Digital Marketing? let’s take a birds-eye view
You have a bunch of social media marketing clients. What would be your responsibilities?
Curate visual content (Images + video + audio ) before you start curating content, you need to determine the object that your content is going to serve.
This calls for research, investigation & aligning of content with the business’s vision & mission. There is a lot that goes into research.
End number of tools to conduct research. For example, if the industry that you are weighing in for is fundamentally new to you, then you are gonna have to go through the latest Industry reports, Market research, consumer research.
As soon as this part is over, then you are gonna have to do competitor research. In the Social Media sphere to conduct competitor research for your niche, there are tools like Inclick Track & Unmetric
These tools give you a birds-eye view over the competition you are gonna have to endure in the industry.
With the help of these tools, you also get content ideas & ideas to repurpose your content strategy.
Then comes the part of scheduling content to social media. You have tons of clients, each requiring content distribution on regular basis on specific times (peak times when traffic is most active) posting content manually can be tedious & time-consuming.
But wait, there are tools out there that can help you to schedule content in advance. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Later & more. But which one to go with, each has its unique selling proposition which is hard to neglect.
This is where information overload again stings you.
How to tackle information overload in Digital Marketing
Now let’s get into how you can tackle information overload in Digital Marketing
First of all, take 5 deep breaths before you go running into it & get ambushed.
If you are on the journey of self-learning that means you are gonna have to consume content & educate yourself.
2 Tools that I have found extremely useful for the same are
1. Feedly:
Feedly is an automation tool. Also known as a smart news reader.
It’s an RSS reader.
What’s an RSS?
RSS is an acronym that stands for Really Simple Syndication. With the help of RSS, you get updates from the blog feed. And guess what? there is no email opt-in required. You get updates from web feed based on your interest & following.
Since there is no email opt-in hence they cannot sell or over-promote to you. Really simple, right?
Feedly is an RSS Reader. It aggregates & collects blog feed using RSS Technology.
A blog feed is the aggregation of articles or content from blogs. Feedly maintains & represents that aggregation to you.
If there is a blog that you follow religiously, chances are that you wouldn’t want to miss out on precious valuable information that it pumps as articles or blog posts.
In the absence of tools like Feedly, you will have to open their website on regular basis to check if there is something new in their feed.
But, if you are using Feedly, then you have the option of following interests, people & blogs. Once you follow these, then all you have to do is log on to your Feedly account & you can see the updated feed of the particular website, blog, person or interest in one place.
Just imagine the amount of time you are able to save with this tool. No more distractions with advertisements or pop-ups.
P.S. There is Feedly APK for Android smartphone users, there is Feedly iOS & there is Feedly for Mac
The reason Feedly is called smart news reader is that people who like to read news on web use Feedly so that they can access news from multiple sources at one place.
2. Pocket
Pocket is a productivity tool used to be known as Read Later. On their SERP it is called Getpocket.
Pocket is personally one of my favorite tools that I use on regular basis. This tool is somewhat similar to Feedly.
Pocket can be used as a tool to read later. As we are in our self-learning journey to learn digital marketing, we have to keep consuming more & more articles & blog posts. With Pocket what you can do is, that you can add the article or blog post to Pocket. It gets saved in the tool where you read later in your spare time.
It iterates & structures the content in an easily readable form free from clutter & with the optimum user experience.
What’s more fascinating is the fact that you also get the audio version of the text-based content that you save. Which means you can literally listen to the content instead of reading it.
As we can tell, it’s 2019 & audio is killing it! 🔥󠅓
P.S. Pocket ( computer application ) is also available as Pocket APK i.e on Android Devices & Pocket iOS for iPhone users.
Tools to help you tackle information overload if you are already working in the industry of Digital Marketing
1. Spreadsheets
I hate how this sounds, believe me. 😵
A spreadsheet is indeed your way to tackle information overload when you are working in the industry of Digital Marketing.
Your role as a Digital Marketer could be Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, PPC, Web Analytics, Competitor Analysis, Content Marketing, Reporting & more.
There is the explosion of data in every step of the way, be it content curation or content distribution or anything else.
Hence it is extremely crucial that you maintain a report on Google spreadsheet. That way you can keep track of every minute aspect.
If there is a new client, you need to create a strategy from scratch. You cannot just strategize in your mind & expect to remember every single point when comes the time for putting the strategy into effect. You need to document your ideas & strategies on Google sheets & share with respective peers.
If you are a social media marketer, your responsibility would be to post content on social on a daily basis. To do just that, you will require a social media calendar template over Google spreadsheet where you define which post with what captions go on what date & time.
This brings us to client reporting, a very crucial aspect of the digital marketing industry. It is an aspect that gives cold shivers to agencies. The client can on any given day out of the blue ask for a report. What then?
If you hadn’t been reporting from the beginning using a report spreadsheet template, then on the judgment date you will go nuts trying to find data, aggregate it & represent it.
There are many other ways spreadsheets can save you from information overload as you work in the Digital Marketing domain.
2. Automation & Analytics Tools
Image source: www.smartladders.com
There is an end number of tools available that assist you in your Digital Marketing whereabouts. Before you succumb again to the information overload, it’s probably better that you narrow down your search to a limited few from which you choose one that best serves your needs & fulfills your objectives.
A good place to ask for recommendations is ProductHunt & Facebook Groups
There are a bunch of tools that help you with Social Media scheduling, analytics, social media monitoring & social media reporting. I would highly recommend you to go with the tool which offers you an all-in-1 solution.
Hootsuite is a great example. With Hootsuite, you can schedule your content, generate custom analytical data & export reports at the same time. This tool removes the hassle of doing all the menial tasks manually. You are rather automating the whole process, saving a bunch of time & contributing the saved time to productivity.
Doing all the tedious unproductive tasks manually exposes you to the massive data, the data that is in its raw form.
You have to synthesize that raw data into presentable format without emitting any minor mistake. The odds of committing mistakes are pretty high. Hence it is highly advisable to anchor tools to automate the process. Most of these tools also make use of Machine learning to achieve perfection.
Wrapping it up
Information overload is inevitable to avoid in the Digital Marketing industry. Even if you have completely learned Digital Marketing, & are now working in the domain; still you will catch up with it.
In this industry nothing stays constant, algorithms are constantly evolving. Consumer trends keep changing. Self-learning is mandatory to survive in this industry. Where there is learning, there is a massive amount of information waiting to be exposed.
Make use of tactics that I have laid out & you will have no trouble tackling information overload.
Originally published at iamdigitalmarketing.blogspot.com on January 7, 2019.
