Psychologists tell us that feelings drive our behavior, while logic justifies after the fact. This theory is confirmed by marketing. People associate personality traits with brands, just as they do people – choosing a favorite brand is similar to choosing a best friend or significant partner. We select the option that makes our feelings.

But emotions can cloud your reasoning, especially when you need to do something that could cause internal pain, like giving constructive criticism or moving on from something you’re attached to, like scrapping a favorite topic from your team’s content calendar.

But there is a way of suppressing this emotional bias. This is a completely data-driven and objective thought process. The rational decision-making model will help you to make logical decisions, even when the consequences are major. For example, if you want to change your blogging strategy.

Before we go through each step, let’s first discuss what rational decision-making is and why it is important.

What is rational decision-making?

The goal of rational decision-making is to solve problems by using logic and objectivity instead of subjectivity. The purpose of sound decisions is to find a Solution to a trial and choose one from multiple options.

Digital marketing is a field that requires a lot of rational decision-making. As humans are emotional beings, our beliefs and biases can distort our perception of the world. Data sharpens the view. Data allows us to make better decisions about our audience by revealing how they interact with our brand.

Check and clarify your problem.

You need to provide evidence before you can prove you have a problem. Data is often seen as the panacea that will diagnose any problem in our strategies, but to be able to prove something, you need to get insights out of your data. You’ll be left with a list of numbers in a spreadsheet if you don’t.

For a specific problem, you can collect and analyze as much information about your needs to identify any alarming patterns.

After analyzing the blog Traffic report, we know why our traffic plateaued over the last year. Our organic traffic increased slightly month to month, but our social and email traffic decreased.

Brainstorm possible solutions to your problem.

By expanding your pool of possible solutions, you increase your chances of finding a solution to your problem. You should use your knowledge and the Internet to gather as much information as you can about your situation in order to find as many possible solutions as possible. To see more answers, you can brainstorm with other people.

Potential Solution 1: We could concentrate on organic traffic, email traffic, and social media traffic at the same.

Potential Solution 2: We could focus on increasing email and social traffic simultaneously — organic traffic is growing already month-over-month, while traffic from emails and social is decreasing.

Possible Solution 3: We could focus solely on increasing social traffic – growing social traffic will be easier than developing organic and email traffic simultaneously. We have over 2 million Facebook followers, which means we can reach a lot of people with our posts.

Possible Solution 4: We could focus solely on increasing email traffic. Growing email traffic is easier to do than developing organic and social traffic simultaneously. We also have 250,000 blog subscriptions so that we can push our posts out to a lot of readers.”

Possible Solution 5: We could focus solely on increasing organic traffic. Growing organic traffic is much easier than simultaneously growing email and social traffic. We just implemented a cluster-pillar model to improve our domain authority. This will help us attract tons of readers from Google.

Establish standards for success and failure when evaluating your solutions.

You can determine the solutions that will solve your problems by setting a success or failure threshold. It would be best if you didn’t put your success standard too high. You would never find a solution. You’ll find an answer if you set realistic, quantifiable, and focused standards.”If our solution increases our total traffic by 10%, then we should consider this a practical method to break through our traffic plateau.”

Identify the possible outcomes of each solution.

Then, determine the consequences of each solution. Create a table of strengths and weaknesses for each answer and compare it to the others. Prioritize your responses from the best chance of solving the problem down to the worst.

Potential Result: “Growing organic traffic, email traffic, and social media traffic all at once could pay dividends. However, our team does not have the time or resources to optimize these three channels.”

Potential Result #2: “Growing both email and social traffic simultaneously would only marginally increase our overall traffic — since each channel accounts for less than 20% of the total traffic.”

Potential Result #3: “Growing our social traffic is difficult by posting a new blog post every day on Facebook because the platform does not elevate links in the feed, and only 5% of the blog traffic comes from the channel.” The results of focusing solely on social media would be minimal”

Potential Result #4: “Growing our email traffic is difficult by sending our blog subscribers two emails every day because we send an email to them every day already, and this channel accounts for only 15% of the traffic to our blog. Concentrating on email would yield minimal results.”

Potentially Result 5: Growing organic traffic is easy by targeting keywords with high search volumes for all our new posts. Google refers about 80% of the traffic to our blog, and we have just implemented a cluster-pillar model.”Focusing on organic results would be the best strategy.”

Test the solution you choose.

Please choose the best solution and test it. You can also start to monitor your preliminary results at this stage.

We believe that focusing on organic traffic is the best and most realistic strategy for us. We’ll test an organic-only system, where we create new content with current or potential search volumes that fit our pillar clusters.

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