1

Digital
marketing is
dead – no it‘s
alive – no it’s
all integrated
now... eh?

T
here isn’t a day that goes past when I’m not deep in discussion with
one digital marketer or another. God knows, when all this kicked off
back in the 1990s digital marketers were a rare enough breed with
a limited vocabulary (banner, online, Yahoo, etc) but now it seems that every­
where you turn people are investing in ‘digital’ and the surrounding air is
peppered with the murmurs of click-throughs, shares, likes, tweets, uniques,
captchas – the lexicon of the modern marketer. Against this flowery backdrop
there are those among us seemingly hell-bent on strangling digital or (worse
still) squeezing it on to a generalized, integrated palette from which to paint
overall marketing challenges.

Some talk of the death of digital in the process. Some describe all marketing
as digital marketing. What’s that about? Why confuse things? I mean it sounds
interesting to talk posthumously of digital but it just isn’t the case. Let me assure
you that technological advances in digital marketing and increased online popu­
lations over the next five years will utterly decimate the integration theory.
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I think it’s more like this: marketing is an art and a science. I believe what digital
marketing is doing brilliantly well is to fulfil the ‘science’ requirement. Further­
more, I believe existing currencies and standards deployed in media research
and traditional reach and frequency models will evolve towards a digital
marketing-based standard or perish in the process. Perhaps the ‘art’ side of
the equation is becoming more integrated but marketers should not lose sight
of the greater scientific challenges and opportunities that are so evident on
our horizon. If anything has become more integrated in recent years it has
been the massive amount of confusion created by practitioners and service
providers as they compete for advertising and marketing spend.

Confusion is creating distressed digital marketers

New buzzwords, new metrics, social is dead, no sorry I meant social is alive
and in fact search is dead... is it? When did that happen? It’s all about data, but
not small data, it has to be big data but phew, at least search is still breathing
and social is too, in fact has anything really changed or is it all different again
– are people really banner blind, does that hurt? Or will Cost Per Engagement
be replaced by Cost Per Marriage, no wait a minute, you can’t do that because
that would mean CPM... gosh I love this business!

Digital marketing slinks on and on …

My pal Richard Eyre (Chairman of the IAB and soon to be Antarctic adventurer)
likens this ever-confusing and elusive world of digital marketing to a ‘slinky
toy going downstairs... and just when you think the toy has stopped on a par­
ticular step, gravity takes over and off it goes again, slinking its way forever
onwards’.
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This ‘digital elusiveness’ is being widely reported as marketers tell us their

fears and doubts about their own level of skill and effectiveness to measure
the impact of their campaigns. At the time of writing (October 2013) Advertising
Week has released some important findings that expose new insights into
the industry’s beliefs and attitudes towards digital marketing. Based on a broad
survey of marketers, the findings revealed a striking lack of confidence in
digital ability. Less than half of marketing professionals who consider them­
selves to be primarily digital marketers feel proficient in digital marketing. A
majority of digital marketers have not received any formal training, with 82 per
cent reporting learning on the job. It goes on to say only 9 per cent of digital
marketers strongly agree with the statement ‘they know their DM is working’
yet 68 per cent felt pressured to show ROI on their marketing spend.

“
Ann Lewnes, Chief Marketing Officer, Adobe, said:

Marketers are facing a dilemma: they aren’t sure what’s working, they’re
feeling underequipped to meet the challenges of digital, and they’re
having a tough time keeping up with the pace of change in the industry.
What’s worse, no one hands you a playbook on how to make it all work.
But the opportunity for marketers is too great to let uncertainty slow
them down. Marketers who are bold in their digital marketing efforts and
investments, who are taking smart risks, and who are training their teams
to be more ‘digital ready’ will be in a great position to capitalize on
digital’s full promise.

“
David Edelman, Global Co-leader, McKinsey Digital, McKinsey & Company, said:

Marketers feel the pressures, and in some cases understand what they
should do, but lack the confidence that they will succeed. They’re anxious
about understanding ahead of time what makes for good creative and
smart digital strategies, managing complexity, and measuring real impact.
Plus, so much of marketing today is a moving target. But you have to get
in there and play and learn. The challenge is getting comfortable with
risks. Set aside a portion of budget – 10–20 per cent – and really try new
things.

Underscoring the strain of rapid change in the industry, a strong majority

(76 per cent) of respondents think marketing has changed more in the past
two years than in the past 50. Sixty-six per cent of all marketers think com­
panies won’t succeed unless they have a digital marketing approach.
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Yvonne Genovese, Managing Vice President, Marketing Leaders Research,

“
Gartner, said:

Business leaders recognize the potential of digital in driving revenue.

Marketers need to rise to the occasion and mature – quickly – in digital
proficiency. The challenge is to stop being digitally paralyzed and start
aligning their products and services to the digital opportunity by building
digital programs, measuring and optimizing. Realizing the positive
outcomes – like customer engagement, retention and conversion –
will rapidly fuel digital marketing maturity and leadership.

The survey data shows a compelling correlation between strong overall busi­
ness performance and digital marketing proficiency. Respondents were asked
to rate their company’s business as ‘high’, ‘average’ or ‘low’ performing. The
data revealed that high-performing companies are twice as likely to rate their
company as highly proficient in digital marketing (50 per cent) than average to
lower-performing companies (25 per cent).

(The data points referenced above come from a study commissioned by Adobe,
produced by research firm Edelman Berland and conducted as an online survey
among a total of 1,000 US marketers. Data was collected between 26 August
and 11 September 2013 by ResearchNow.)

But digital spend stats are not confusing

Digital marketing is very much alive! Moreover it’s doing rather well. Emarketer
(thanks guys) reports digital ad spending worldwide to be worth $117 billion
in 2013; that’s about 15 per cent up on 2012 and is set to grow by at least
another 50 per cent worldwide over the next four years. That includes mature
markets such as North America while emerging markets like the Middle East
and Africa are literally set to boom by at least 300 per cent over the same
period – this against a backdrop that will see the worldwide online population
treble over the same period. So there you go – digital is doing ok!

Collaboration is key
Each book I write has its own flavours and trends, just like its own social
media, and the first thing that leapt off the pages for me while I was writing
this book was the growing trend for collaboration. Not just the collaboration
between marketer and customer but the collaboration for overall positive,
worthwhile results. It strikes me how much easier it might be for distressed
 DIGITAL MARKETING IS DEAD 5

digital marketers to seek a collaborative solution rather than suffer the barrage
of a million service providers all with the ‘right’ solution to their marketing
challenge.

In the last edition of Understanding Digital Marketing (published in 2012)

I applauded the efforts of www.collaborativeconsumption.org to bring a sense
of order and awareness to this growing global trend. Can digital marketers
collaborate and learn from one another? It’s certainly something not to be left
unattended and we hope that our new platform (see www.understandingdigital.
com) goes some way to meet this challenge.

Responsive design is most definitely key

Another obvious highlight was the importance of considering the increasing
plethora of devices and how important it is to ensure your campaign and
overall digital marketing is relevant to all devices at the same time – we call
this ‘responsive design’. Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing Manager for

“
Google, explains and advises:

These days we’re constantly connected, shifting from one device to

another for communication, shopping and entertainment. Our recent
research revealed that 90 per cent of people move between devices to
accomplish a goal. These ‘sequential screeners’ now expect a superb
experience regardless of what they’re using to browse on, whether PC,
laptop, tablet, smartphone, wearable or television.
To build engagement and drive conversions it’s increasingly essential that
businesses create a great user experience to serve consumers across all
of these options. But where to begin?
First, consider the trends. Who uses multiple devices? What do they value
when they search? How do people browse when they’re using more than
one screen?
Understand how your own customers interact with your site. Analyse
traffic and develop an understanding of where your customers come
from, at what times they visit, what types of content they consume and
what devices they use.
Adapt your value proposition to customers’ needs. The goal here is to
tailor and rearrange content for specific audiences rather than removing
it and offer a stripped down version of your website. Keeping the user in
mind when designing device-specific content is key to crafting a positive
experience for your customers.
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Measure your site’s load times. Faster websites make for a better user
experience. As more and more people are using the web on multiple
devices, be sure that your site performs as well as it can across all of
them.
Decide on an implementation option. There are three common
approaches that address multi-device consumers and allow for content
customization based on user context. These are separate mobile and
desktop sites with separate URLs, dynamically serving different HTML
on the same URL, and having the same HTML and same URL with
responsive web design (RWD).
RWD enables businesses to optimize site experience across different
screen sizes without creating multiple websites. We’re seeing growing
numbers of leading brands succeed with this approach. For example,
PlusNet grew its sales on mobile tenfold, and in the finance sector
Baines & Ernst increased mobile conversions 51 per cent and Towergate
increased mobile visits 218 per cent.
Once you’ve implemented your own multi-device strategy, measure,
analyse and iterate. Keep an eye on performance to optimize content
and improve user engagement. Successful businesses with multi-device
websites continuously monitor interactions across screens to maintain
a strong web presence no matter where, when or how users are
interacting with their brands.

The final key!

We’re not going backwards. Right now we are at the beginning of the greatest
communications revolution in history. More content has been produced in
the last two years than has been produced since the dawn of time (Eric
Schmidt). There are more people alive now to buy your product than have
ever lived. The complexities of selling to a global audience have been partially
solved by the creation of the web. How successful we are online will depend
entirely on how we learn to excel at digital marketing. That might be about
understanding analytics or social media but above all it’s about understanding
people and how they want to engage with you. Not all this success can be
secured through a traditional classroom environment – and this book doesn’t
contain all the answers either. Perhaps the key is collaboration, only time will
tell, but meanwhile digital marketing is very much alive and enjoying its
teenage years. Like most teenagers it’s a bit of a worry but let’s not be
‘marketing parents’ and insist it subscribes to a set of rules that none of us
really know how to write!
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