Sweat the small stuff

"There's gold in them thar hills!"

I can understand the reason behind it - digital marketers just post stuff on Facebook right? How hard can that be? Over a billion people do it every day. And by all means, do it. The entrepreneurial spirit is the cornerstone of a modern society, and if you're able to get a company to pay you for your services, more power to you.

But before we all rush out in a wave of mutual admiration, back patting and putting deposits down on office space - I must ask you to answer a simple question first: are you able to properly define the value?

Why value?

Before I even answer that, I need to express a very key point: the cost of something is not equal to its value. And very rarely is.

The value commodity in digital marketing is often very difficult to ascertain. There are social metrics and insights to garner the effectiveness of one's efforts, and there are tools to help us get there. There are insights available, for free, as part of some of the platforms, as well as free analytics tools to help you with the data mining if you're not all that spreadsheet savvy, and even more detailed deep insight tools for a fee that do the heavy lifting for you. Although be wary of merely mining statistics for the sake of pretty graphs without fully grasping the intrinsic meaning of exactly what it is you're looking at, and for.

More important to me, however, are the psychometric values that a brand can gain across social media. These are the near-impossible to measure statistics that can prove to be the single most powerful tool for a brand: Perception.

Consider an exercise in perception: Take a random selection of brands in the digital space, pick a platform of choice, and see how they are communicating. What is your perception of that brand based solely on the ways in which they communicate? Good, bad or indifferent.

When you do this kind of analysis, what you are seeing, at a base level are the images, words, hashtags, memes or overall basic elements of social messaging. These are the "talkers" - the elements that speak to you directly. In simple terms, they're the bits that do the talking.

I'm far more interested in the "thinkers" - the parts of each communication that work with you on a subconscious level, infiltrating your cognitive responses in ways we will, more often than not, miss at a conscious level. But boy do they play a part in the psychometric wins and losses in the marketing headspace.

It's all in the detail

In digital marketing, don't ever let your guard down. Always sweat the small stuff. These little details can work to boost your positive brand sentiment through consistent messaging.

Full sentences, beautifully written copy, and a proper apostrophe are just some of the things so often glossed over with the roll of the eyes. But over and above the bane of Grammar Nazi existence, is the misunderstanding, and misuse of the tools within each social platform that you can use to increase your brand messaging.

Images that are properly formatted for each platform and post are vital...and so often poorly utilised. With a "talker", you'd want to make sure the sizing is correct. When we then delve in to the level of the "thinker", how do the colours in the image link to your brand, post topic, key messaging and content strategy? Are you including properly formatted images with each link you share? Or just allowing the website to pull in whatever meta image happens to be there?

When you're tweeting images, are you thinking of ways you can use the different layouts of the preview image in the timeline versus the full image, and again, how this relates to your key messaging and content strategy? How are these images formatted to allow the native previewing in the timeline, rather than as purely an image link?

These are just tiny examples of the world of opportunity across a myriad of marketing strategies and tools. The level of the "thinkers" propel a brand message to a far greater perceptive height in the subconscious mind of a consumer by relating the brand messaging to intelligent, aspirational ideals that are consistently both on brand, and based on relevant insights.

It's an altogether befuddling and exciting world for a brand to create an aspirational, talking, and thinking, brand message in everything you do as a brand, marketer, or even overnight ninja.

It's the small, imperceptible details that make good, great.

In digital marketing and communications, sweat the small stuff. If you're not walking around with a proverbial towel, you're doing it wrong.