Make Digital Marketing Work

I see t all over the place online, and particularly on commercialised blogs.  People have content articles which you start to read when suddenly a hover ad in a style sheet dims the article you are reading and demands that you interact with it, or close the article.  Well guess what, I close the article and I suspect everyone else does as well.

Some of them do at least have a close option on them but others are so badly written (or so determined to get a click and a bit of commission at any cost) that the rest of the site becomes useless and pointless for the visitor.

This kind of advertising isn’t a million miles away from the shop assistant who immediately accosts you and pesters you from the moment you walk into their shop until the moment you get fed up and storm out vowing never to go back.

In both cases there is absolutely no engagement, and the only thing in their eyes is dollar signs.  It is also an attitude that is more likely to actually prevent a sale from happening than pretty much anything else

Any sale is completed by consent from both sides.  These types of site are not destined to produce any real revenue for the owner because the vast majority of visitors will close down and go somewhere else.    As a result any useful content that the site has amassed is completely wasted.

We know that Google’s Adwords work because they give you exactly what you are interested in at exactly the time you are looking for information on it.  Compare that to an Ad that isn’t targeted and won’t go away and interrupts you whilst you are researching something else.  How likely is that ad to succeed?

As a professional I am incredulous that people persist with these tactics and would urge everyone to sit and think about what they were doing.  There is a way to market, advertise and promote yourself online and it works.  Why would you want to pick techniques that didn’t work?

There are a great deal of column inches  being given over to the news last week that Digital spend overtook TV advertising for the first time ever in the UK.

The news on one side is being met with delight from those of the digital marketing profession, and it’s easy to understand why.  Digital Marketers have been made to feel like the poor relations of marketing by what a friend of mine describes as the ‘Grand Fromages’ of advertising, for over a decade.  It seems only natural, reasonable and expected that these digital marketers would want to crow long and loud about this news.

On the other hand these Grand Fromages of advertising are quick (some might say too quick) to point to the irrelevance of this news.  My point is that this response is just another extension of the arrogance they were displaying when they dismissed digital marketing ten years ago.  I feel the same way about it now as I did then…. wait and see what happens.

They, of course, have a point (they usually do) and that point is that TV advertising is one mass media type.  It is the flagship of mass media types but it is still just one.  Above the line is made up of poster ads, Radio and TV.  In fact anything that is mass media is above the line.  Digital marketing is made up of a number of disciplines including natural search, PPC, Email/eCRM, Web design/user experience, social media and digital media display ads.

If you compare above the line budgets they are still streets ahead of digital and that doesn’t even take into account the amount spent on offline direct marketing.

They are however missing an important point which is that most clients do not divide their budgets up by sub dividing digital.  They allocate a digital budget at the top table and it is then left to tactical suppliers to divide that budget at a lower level.  So maybe it isn’t such an unfair comparison to make.

My view is that this is an important milestone, It isn’t significant of an outcome in and of itself but it is a place marker that we will look back at when the real destinations are reached.  Oh and yes I do think that the journey will continue and the balance will continue to tip in Digital Marketing’s favour.