Make Digital Marketing Work

We have written before about how the word strategy is abused within the world of digital marketing and the temptation to rely on tactics, but one of the biggest casualties is often the Marketing Process.  To explain it I need to define terms.

• A marketing strategy is the big picture plan that looks at the resources available to you.  That can include the budget, available channels, your skill set, the prevailing market conditions, distribution, your customers themselves and of course all of the 4 Ps from the marketing Mix.  Collectively these  form a battle plan of how to create customer satisfaction, product sales, and secure revenue for the organisation.
• A Marketing process is the application of this strategy as a turnkey solution.  It consists of a series of tactics.  Imagine a machine that you turn the handle and it produces results out the other end, so that whenever the process is activated, you can predict the results of what will happen each time.

As an example, a process could consist of writing a blog post about your products and then promoting the blog post on Twitter and Facebook.  Each time you do that, you can expect a number of people to click on the promotional links and read your blog post.

This is definitely a process, but it isn’t a strategy and nor is it strategic because it only gets people reading your blog post.  It delivers nothing in product sales and it can’t legitimately claim to have secured any profit for the organisation.  If it has a bill attached to the activity it has in fact cost you money.  The best you can say is that a few people have now heard of you.

That kind of process can only be considered tactical and the sad fact is that tactics are what an awful lot of digital agencies offer to clients.  The results can be hugely disappointing.  As a strategic digital agency, we appreciates the need for bottom line results  and work across the various digital channels such as Search, Social Media, User experience, Web Design, Email, eCRM, analytics, and advertising.  Because of this we have a different proposition to make to clients than traditional tactical digital agencies.  That can be a little difficult to appreciate because the focus for us is on customers and the bottom line rather than technical disciplines.

An awful lot of online activity results in a lot of noise that ultimately achieves very little.  To avoid this. your online marketing strategy must place a focus on the commercial needs of the organisation and engages prospects, It should also plan the route through to a point where customers are created nurtured and retained.  That is why an online marketing strategy should be the basis for online marketing processes, and should also be a priority for all organisations.

I received an email recently which began:

“With more and more marketing interactions conducted via digital media, it is now much harder for B2B brands to gauge what their potential customers think about their products or services, let alone understand where they are in the buying cycle.”

I can’t tell you how much that introduction annoyed me.  Harder compared to when?  Maybe they are referring to before the telephone was invented when every salesman put on his running shoes and took his starting blocks every morning to traipse door to door?  Or maybe they are talking about after the telephone was invented but before the Internet when Direct mail, reply mail, market research and telesales provided expensive and low response  methods to stay informed and up to date with all thing sales and customer related.

Personally I thought that the statement was ludicrous.  The complexity of yesteryear was that quite often not enough information was available and so guesswork was employed.  These days, there is so much information available that analysing it is a skill in its own right.  My problem though is that relying on guess work against analysis is hardly more difficult to do.  It might be more complex but difficult is the wrong word.

For a start if you want to find out what your customers think about you in the marketplace, just go to Google, Twitter or Facebook, and you can do so from the comfort of your own home.  If you need information from them why not send out a well worded email and ask them?  The email can point them at a webpage which securely connects with your database and then all you will have to do is look at the forecast.  How is that difficult?  It takes skill sure, and a bit of knowhow but difficult isn’t the word.

That leads me on nicely to the art of words.  Marketing communications are all about words.  Copywriters understand that words have colours, textures, tastes, feelings and volumes.  These combine together to evoke a response from customers.  Done well they will have customers flocking to find out more about you.  Done badly they will annoy your customers and have them making a mental note to avoid you like the plague.  No software solution has yet been able to replace good copywriting and the software that the email I received was probably not going to solve my reporting and analysis problems (mainly because I understand my customers and know what to measure and how and therefore do not need some generic jumped up spreadsheet to help me). Bad copywriting in the modern workplace will have people like me reaching for their blogs and sharing how bad your message is with the rest of the world.