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Empowering your Digital Marketing Team

Empowering your Digital Marketing Team

By David Dewhirst Share This Story | | Tags   Insider

As I begin this post I’m sitting in a classroom in downtown Chicago about to begin a Tealium University course on how to help BlueCross BlueShield implement the Tealium iQ software.

If you’re not familiar with Tealium, it’s enterprise-level tag management software, “tag” in this case meaning chunks of JavaScript code rather than the kind of keyword tagging common to blogging and social media posting.

Why do large enterprises need tag management software? It’s not uncommon for one company to have multiple sites and even completely different domains – sometimes dozens of them, depending on corporate structure, product lines, branding strategies, and the like. That same corporation might have several web publishing / front-end development teams, each with responsibility for several of those many corporate sites.

Now imagine that JavaScript for Google Analytics and JavaScript for Tealeaf and JavaScript for DoubleClick (or again, “tags” in Tealium parlance) had to be added to every single page across all of the enterprise’s sites. Multiple teams of developers get to work adding those tags.

Now imagine something changes in one of those tags – and those multiple teams of developers set out to make the tag change in multiple locations. Then another change to the tag comes down – and once again, multiple developers are required to make that change in multiple locations.

Yikes. If you’re operating in an enterprise environment, or even in a fair-sized SMB, those tag changes are actually costing you a lot of money. They’re also introducing multiple places where a creepy, crawly, nasty bug could slip into your code when the developer makes a one-off typo as he’s pasting in the tag – which could also cost a sizeable chunk of money.

Contrast that with a company using tag management software. All of the company’s tags are configured and managed in the management software itself, which then spits out one piece of JavaScript at the end. This JavaScript still needs to be placed by front-end developers on all of an enterprise’s various websites – but only once, which minimizes time and the chance of error. Any future changes to the tags only need to be done once, within the tag management software, which further minimizes cost and the chance of introducing a bug.

We’ve done a lot of imagining and techno-babbling with all that, so let me put all that in a slightly friendlier, more relatable way: Because tags can be created and managed in the software, typically without much assistance from a front-end developer beyond initial implementation, tag management software can empower your marketing department to get down and dirty with the digital. Want to try out a new script tag or a new vendor? Need to place special tags because you want to run a distinct campaign? Tag management software like iQ lets you get to that without the time and expense (and yes, sometimes the frustrations) of getting IT or IS and a variety of front-end developers involved.

Now, I’m emphasizing the time and money factors here for a couple of reasons. Time is money, of course, and over and over again what I see are companies making bad decisions, or being forced into bad decisions, because they simply don’t have enough time. In fact, without having conducted an actual scientific study on the matter, I would say that 80% of the people I’ve worked with professionally know the right things to do – they just don’t have the time to do them. Heck, I’ve even fallen into that trap myself on more than one occasion.

The other big reason for talking about the time and money factors is of course that not only is time money, but money is also money. (Go figure, right?) I know firsthand that in an enterprise setting results are sometimes valued via some strange calculus that can seem like it ignores money altogether – but at the end of the day, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone, somewhere is looking at the money that’s been spent in their division, or their department, or their group, and figuring out the best way to explain that to their boss.

So when something like tag management software comes along, with its promise of potentially saving loads of time and piles of money, I’m interested. I’m interested in it for myself, because I can see the value proposition in my particular situation, but I’m also interested in it for my clients – because the work that ThreeTwelve Creative does as an interactive agency for its clients comes down to two things: Saving them time, and helping them make money.

Tealium iQ holds the promise of being another tool in the ThreeTwelve Creative toolbox to allow us to do just that.

And hey, if I get to have a great pint of Innis & Gunn (looking at you, Elephant & Castle) in the process, who am I to complain?

To contact ThreeTwelve Creative about Tealium or any other need you might have, please don’t hesitate to get a hold of us. You can click here, email us at creative@threetwelvecreative, or give us a call at 877-434-4369 (U.S.).

 

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Doing the same things over and over and getting nowhere? Come investigate solutions with ThreeTwelve, a complete interactive agency serving clients in Chattanooga and around the world.

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