Though it’s Wednesday, I honestly don’t feel the fatigue that often comes with the middle of the workweek. What helps me along, I think, is my structured schedule, filled with tasks, meetings, and short-term deadlines to keep me busy, as well as the knowledge that there’s a weekend break coming up that will allow me to recharge. In academia I never felt like I was given this kind of break. There were no clear work-life boundaries, and guilt and perfectionism drove me to be constantly “on the job”.
In the morning I and a colleague, who runs social media for the Hispanic market, have a call with the Arizona Cardinals’ social media team. We’ve had a longstanding relationship with the franchise, and our call focuses on ways to better leverage the relationship, including a potential sweepstakes.
Afterwards I set aside a few hours to work on our back-to-school promotion, which launches on Friday. I go over the images provided by the creative services team, reviewing both the cover images for different channels as well as images for ads. I look over the series of webpages created for the promotion and come up with an educated guess as to which ones will perform best – those are the ones I’ll launch with. I add coding to their URLs that will let us track performance, and decide on the copy that will accompany the images. All of this information goes into a spreadsheet I send to our Facebook marketing partner, who will be running the ads on our behalf. Given my limited bandwidth, working with a vendor is a must: it allows me to run and optimize multiple ad campaigns, provides testing and analytical capabilities that we wouldn’t have otherwise, and leaves me time to work on other tasks.
Before leaving the office, I get on a call with our Facebook reps. They want to share information about new video advertising enhancements they’d like to help us test. In today’s rapidly evolving digital world, a key component of a marketer’s job is seeking out and testing new technologies. Will a new algorithm or application allow us to reach new audiences? Can it increase the rate at which those audiences are converted into customers? Or could it help us track and report patterns that may help us better understand how audiences are converted into customers?
I discuss Facebook’s suggestions further with my colleague who manages our YouTube content and advertising. We put together a plan to test the new video ad capabilities, including the video assets we’ll use, the webpages we’ll direct people to from the videos, and general benchmarks for the test. Much of the work on our team involves collaboration of this sort, since we all have the same overarching goals but each one of us is an expert on specific channels and tools.
The Rosetta Stone digital marketing team, hard at work.
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