If you hire a marketing agency, one of your first and most crucial challenges will be learning to trust in their expertise. It can be tempting to roll up your sleeves and want to understand every intricacy of their technology or their tactics, but you should instead try to stay at the strategic level. If you get bogged down in wanting to know all of the keyword variations your Google Advertising expert is using, for example, you just wasted a lot of time that would be better invested elsewhere.

Facebook has been pretty straightforward about the latest generation of its feed and reach algorithm: Facebook Groups are getting priority. Given trends in social media toward more hyper-focused community engagement, this makes sense, but it won’t be easy for marketers because your traditional Facebook strategy won’t apply.

Data helps us to cut to the heart of what is really working, getting us past the bias of what we like or don’t like to see what customers really respond to. Unfortunately, sometimes data is softer and fuzzier than we like, and it’s important to be aware of that. For example, had a client of ours looked only at the raw LinkedIn data they got for the videos they shared, they would have missed out on the bigger picture of how their video campaigns affected their reputation.

Our ability to gather mountains of data on our marketing can create blindspots where we forget to address the areas that are difficult to measure. When you aren’t paying attention to the steps that are not being measured, you can end up blaming the wrong thing for your marketing challenges.