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.

There is a huge amount of debate going on the web suddenly where everyone is talking about Strategy.  Most of it is concerned with Social Media and both singular, (Strategy) and plural (Strategies) are being bandied around.  The thing is that most of the time the people saying it are not talking about strategy (either singular or plural) at all.  What they are talking about is tactics.

Just so we get this right.  A strategy is the grand plan, and in marketing terms it has a business goal.  That business goal might be to increase sales (and if we are talking about digital media I would argue that any strategy that doesn’t have this goal is shooting too low),  it could be to raise brand awareness, gather more prospects, increase customer retention (which by nature should include an element of increasing sales as well).  The point is that it is tangible.  It is related to the business as a whole and says “This is what success looks like and this is how we are going to measure it.  I like to apply an acid test when I define a digital marketing strategy and that is to ask myself “Would David Ogilvy agree with me and understand what I was talking about”.  It’s amazing how focused this little mantra can make you.

Now at no point in defining my strategic goal have I used the words blogging, Facebook, Twitter, email, eCRM, display advertising, social media, search, SEO, SEM, Website, user experience, usability, accessibility, backlinks, Google, Bing, ad exchanges, PPC or any of the other terms that make up the digital marketing armoury.  That’s because these are not strategies, they are tactics.  Another dead giveaway for when people don’t understand the difference seems to me to be when they start talking about strategies in the plural.  It’s a pretty intense and complicated thing for a campaign to achieve one strategic goal so bandying them around like baubles on a Christmas Tree is a dangerous thing to do and could quite likely lead to a confused campaign.

Once the strategic goals have been set my next task is to look at the customer.  Another little mantra I like to use comes from my days as a drama student.

(As an aside, I was probably the worst drama student in the world but there were lots of extremely cute girls that were also drama students and I was in a minority of heterosexual men so this suited my strategic goal at the time and enabled me to employ many tactics to achieve it.)

The mantra takes Stanislavsky’s seven questions of An Actor Prepares and refers them to my customer.

• Who are they?
• Where are they?
• When is it?
• What do they want?
• Why do they want it?
• How will they get it?
• What must be overcome?

There is another three that I like to add in as well which are:

• What will they do with it once they have got it?
• What do they currently think?
• What do I want them to think?

This paints a very clear picture for me of my two ends.  I know what I want to achieve and how to measure it and now I know a lot about the people who are going to help me do it.

At this point I start to look at my tactics.  I look at how to contact them, and I start to plan the journey we need to undertake together in order to reach my strategic goal.  It’s only at this point that I will start to talk about the elements of digital marketing that can help us, and there is absolutely nothing to gain by limiting myself to one tactic.  I want to use as many as I can and as many as the budget will allow.

This process keeps me focused and ensures that everything I do has the goal in mind.

I suspect it’s no different to a boxer whose strategic goal is to knock his opponent out in the fifth round.  He looks at the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent, studies previous fights and looks for ways to achieve his goal.  He then decides to tactically use his jab and concentrate on body work.  He plans the journey the fight will take so that he is ready in the fifth to land his big punch and achieve his strategic goal.  Never will he talk about his body work strategy.

In my post yesterday I talked a lot about Digital Marketing strategy and how some Offline and integrated agencies could have problems adapting.  This world isn’t so removed though from the wisdom of the great men of advertising though.  One of David Ogilvy’s most well known sayings was:

“If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular. “

He was of course referring to the way that sentences were constructed but the key point here is that you should use a tone and style that is familiar to consumers.  For the point I am making I would suggest using the channels, language and grammar of the Internet.   Grammar in these terms refers to yuser experience, SEO awareness, viral and all the other buzzwords that populate our trade press.  Some of us have watched and helped these channels evolve (Digital Pioneers?), whilst other people discovered them when they became popular but there is another sort of person and that is the Digital Native.  These are people for whom online and a tweet are as familiar as a pint in a pub.  These are the people who talk in the ‘vernacular’ of digital media and whose creative minds are tuned to the available channels.  Consequently these were the people we decided to look at when we were assembling our creative offer.

There is always a risk when you bet on youth.  Sir Matt Busby with the Busby Babes and Arson Wenger with his dedication to the Arsenal Youth are parallels that have struck us as poignant.  One thing for sure though and that is consumers are not going to put up with, nor respond to the bolted on and shoe horned offline creative that has traditionally been appearing in digital media.  The acid test is whether the creative produces effective return on investment for the client, not whether a panel has decided it warrants a reward (of course both is a goal that everyone should strive for).

My personal feeling is that Mr Ogilvy would have relished the new media around today and would have been unafraid to learn the vernacular and bet on youth who understood all the grammatical points of the channel.