I’ve seen it happen to good people. Smart people. I’ve even been seduced a few times.

We’ve all been victims of unnecessarily complex marketing.

With the massive amount of data and tools available to modern marketers, it’s easy to get caught up and try to use everything at once, just because we can. I see it almost every day in flow charts and presentations. Decision nodes with paths branching every way possible with multiple processes strung together, all with unique criteria that can change on a dime and alter the record’s course.

When I was newer to the game, I would ooh and awe with the crowd. And I loved the challenge of taking that intense strategy and making it something real that data could flow through.

But now, while my initial reaction is still “Yeah we can do that“, I find my followup thought often being “But should we do all that?“.

I think that’s sometimes interpreted as laziness, but in reality, my ultimate goal is to create something that works, is scalable, and measurable. Where others see a highly customized and advanced strategy I see an increasing number of potential failure points, painful efforts in making updates or optimizations, and a spiderweb of activity to try and track and report on.

I sound pretty negative, right? But my highly critical view comes from years of building these solutions and knowing the typical lifecycle:

1. Plan
2. Build / QA / Launch
3. Measure
4. Adjust / Test / Optimize
5. Ongoing Support

Steps 3-5 are probably the least considered when going through steps 1 and 2, which is unfortunate, to say the least. Measurement can be a nightmare for extremely complex marketing flows depending on how many different paths a person can take. Live adjustments to criteria or timers are potentially hazardous in long chains of automation or triggers. Testing and optimization share the same dangers. Ongoing support tasks are a battle as business processes change over time and these massive campaigns need to be overhauled or completely rebuilt. New team members who are unfamiliar with the original work may also take exceptionally long to familiarize themselves and be prone to errors.

BUT I want to be clear…

Complex marketing campaigns and automation can be things of beauty. When a strategist and solution architect work together to flex digital marketing muscle the result can be an intelligent and personalized experience that generates consistent, scalable results.

My tips when Building Complex Marketing Campaigns:

1. Find critical elements that support the goal.
   When presented with a large-scale campaign with numerous moving parts, identify what the main purpose is. Maybe it’s generating webinar registrants, getting someone ready to talk to a sales rep, pushing the sale of a specific product. Once you’ve identified that goal find the critical elements that drive to the goal. Strip down the campaign to those elements first.
2. Identify opportunities to customize the experience that make sense
   If we’re really honest with ourselves, there’s marketing magic that adds value and some we throw in just because we can. Question the value of every branch, merge field, variation, etc. Sometimes we want to cover every single edge case that can occur in a user’s journey, but we should avoid the temptation upfront. Keep in mind, these items can also make measurement trickier down the road. Make sure the benefit outwieghs any risk or added dependancy.
3. Build with modularity in mind
   When it comes down to building the actual automation campaigns or workflows, break them down into modular ‘blocks’ that can be chained together. This way if edits need to be made, specific blocks can be deactivated, edited or removed without compromising the entire campaign. It’s also easier for future users to deconstruct and understand a campaign that’s modular.For example, in the case of simple a webinar workflow, some would build the registration, confirmation email, and reminder emails with timers all in one flow. My preferred method would be to break the process apart with registration and confirmation, then each reminder all in separate flows that chain into one another. This way if a reminder needs to be added, removed or altered, you can do so without worry. This method is especially effective when working with large-scale automation processes.

Again, I’m all for amazing marketing technology that allows for ultra-personalized and intelligent automation. But I’m also a proponent of starting with simple, clean, and supportable processes that don’t need to be complicated. Save the magic tricks for special campaigns that give you the most bang for the buck.