Digital Marketer

Eileen Brown, Betsy Aoki

• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781780174020
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

In the digital age of today, digital marketing is essential to making products and services a success and digital marketers are more and more in demand. This book is your guide to becoming a digital marketer and succeeding in this fast moving, technology-driven profession. Topics include the expertise and array of skills you will need; how to stay current and future-proof your career; useful digital marketing tools, channels, frameworks and procedures; how to measure campaign success, and how to take the next steps to advance in your digital marketing career.

1 OVERVIEW OF THE DIGITAL MARKETING FIELD

This chapter introduces the broad category of digital marketing and positions this within the professional marketing field. It emphasises recent technological platforms as marketing channels and discusses how to take advantage of advances in marketing analytics. The chapter also includes the bridging of old and new marketing concepts.

These are fundamentals upon which the book will build its premise: exploring the digital marketer role and its many facets.

TRADITIONAL VS. DIGITAL MARKETING

Let’s start this chapter by looking at traditional marketing vs. digital marketing.

Firstly, think about all the ways businesses have traditionally reached out to their customers (or potential customers) to create brand awareness or bring about a sale.

Take a look at the examples below, ranked in order from free to most expensive:

1. Word-of-mouth. A satisfied customer can often be the best advertising.
2. Favourable mention in a community bulletin, such as a church or school newsletter – possibly in relation to a charitable or joint project with those institutions.
3. An organic club or community of product users arises – think book club, motorcycle or car club and so on.
4. Favourable mention in a newspaper or on television or radio as the product is talked about in the news or the founder of the company is interviewed by the press.
5. Paid advertisement in a newspaper, radio ad or television.
6. Paid endorsement by a celebrity or person of status in a media channel.
7. Presence in a physical location – a stall at a community Sunday market, space in a consignment shop, all the way up to an ongoing storefront in an expensive location.

Now, think about how these translate to the digital realm – sometimes they are cheaper and sometimes they need more work (the physical realm has physical costs and limits on how many messages can come at a human being, but digital channels have no physical limits other than the user’s attention span).

1. Word-of-mouth. A new customer can hear about your product or service from their friends through a digital channel they have already opted into – such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Snapchat. Because this recommendation, like the in-person word-of-mouth counterpart, relies on social ties, it can be very effective as the speaker on your behalf already has the potential customer’s trust.
2. Favourable mention in a community publication. In this case, recommendation of your product on an online forum where like-minded people gather (think car enthusiasts, followers of certain rock bands and so on) works a bit like word-of-mouth. Forum users are usually familiar with each other and self-selected as people of like mind on consumption of specific content or other topics. Trust is higher than an interruptive advertisement because a recommendation is embedded in a topic that the users already care about.
3. Community. One of the best outcomes for a product is that an online community arises around your product or service itself. In this case, fans of your line of gadgetry, home repair techniques or other examples of your product will be discussing your product with each other. While this does create an obligation for you to deal with customer support issues and hear complaints about your product or service, this kind of community creates fertile ground for you to offer previews, exclusive content tutorials, discounts and announcements of new products or services members will want to buy right away.
4. Earned media. This kind of publicity can work against a company, as when a flaw in a product is discovered or some scandal with the business leaders arises, but it is marketing that the company does not have to pay for directly and digital marketers will be looking to maximise positive outcomes here.
5. Paid media. This includes marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube with the aim of raising awareness of a product, acquiring customers or converting people to a sale. Online channels could report engagement and if instrumented properly, conversion, with high precision. So, money must be spent here but it is possible to understand how successful or problematic that spend is ahead of time. Careful pilots and monitoring of analytics from the campaign assist with this.
6. Celebrity endorsement. To use this approach, the digital marketer will need cash, early assessment of whether the celebrity or influencer is the right fit for the target audience of your product and careful fine-tuning of the contract or relationship.
7. Digital presence. Here, ongoing digital presence translates to digital channels and locations where your customers can be immersed in your brand and message, as well as order your products or services. This is where you make your digital stamp upon the world and well-informed consumers will look you up, for example, ‘does this business have a website?’, ‘can I email someone at the business to set up an appointment?’, ‘can I book an appointment online?’, ‘can I purchase their product without leaving my house?’ Such a presence may include shopping cart technology so people can pay for your product or service.

The digital marketer will need to take on the challenge of mixing and matching these techniques in a way that best supports their business. For example, some businesses may have customers that are not on broad social media platforms; some businesses may have customers in a demographic that heavily uses one digital channel and not another (think game walkthroughs on YouTube or Twitch) and some businesses may find their customers are in transition from traditional to digital means of communication.

The seismic marketing shift

The key changes between traditional and digital marketing over the past few years fall into these categories:

1. Speed from concept to execution. What might take months traditionally, for example, a magazine going to press, can take days digitally, for example, an online publication highlighting the marketing message.
2. Democratisation of taste making – where once it was the designers and fashion critics solely holding forth on what New York or London or Paris said were the trends, now Instagram, lifestyle Pinterest boards and fashion blogs command as much or more social cachet of taste making.
3. Enhanced analytics – with technology platforms able to give deeper analysis automatically of what users are doing online, the digital marketer can now know their customers more accurately than they ever could in the analogue world.
4. Higher emphasis on relationship and community-building – while in other eras it might have taken years for word-of-mouth and geographic barriers to be overcome for a business, now the internet allows businesses to have paying customers at a far remove. Social discourse online now needs active management of brand or product perception on a 24 hours a day, seven days a week basis.
5. Rapid change in the customer landscape – what is signal today may become irrelevant noise tomorrow. Digital marketers must continually keep abreast of technology advances and public sentiment shifts as the online conversations continue.

Changes in basic approach and the marketer role

How has this seismic shift in marketing played out? Let’s look first at the expectations and basic skills of the traditional marketer and then compare that with those expected of digital marketers.

Digital marketers, coming on the heels of traditional marketers, get to make use of techniques from both worlds (and should, since their target audiences may live in both spaces).

Traditional

In the past, traditional marketing skills encompassed such areas as creating a marketing plan with messaging, value propositions and key goals that could be broken down into separate strategic initiatives and then further into action plans. Once the marketer was focused on a promotional marketing initiative and broke that further into its components or action plans, they would need the skills to address the following tasks:

1. Testing the proposed message or branding on focus groups or simply ad hoc customer groups that could be depended on to give critical and necessary feedback. Since this message drives the content, knowing that it resonates first is best before actually creating the meat of the campaign.
2. Strategising and executing on creative collateral, including:
   1. Copywriting for magazine and newspaper advertisements.
   2. Working with media professionals to create radio or TV broadcast ads.
   3. Making use of designers and layout professionals to create stunning brochures or other such conference booth materials.
   4. Understanding effective pitch language for direct mail advertisements and the demographics of paid mailing lists.
3. Working by oneself or with a team, executing the actual delivery of the creative materials to the specifications of the advertising industry, conference or in-person presentation requirements or getting collateral to mailing distributors.
4. A traditional marketer, while not an accountant, still has to account for every expenditure and understand the finances within a marketing strategy, such as:
   1. Controlling and accounting for campaign costs: how much a coupon or in-store discount could be before it started cutting into the business, how much it costs to obtain a new customer, whether a campaign approach is effective, how much a buy-one-get-one-free offer encourages repeat business and so on.
   2. Understanding the limitations of a company’s budget and the importance of this campaign within the company’s goals. For example, as a start-up or a sole proprietorship gets going, less is known about what will be effective for it and its customers. The company may need more marketing in the first year compared to one year later, and it may need to spend more to set the baseline for further optimisation.
   3. Understanding any seasonality that affected the ability to promote. So, for example, you would not try to make waves in the news for your product launch if you knew that the nation’s focus would be on that week’s football match, and it would be hard to get them to pay attention to other, non-football related concerns.

Digital marketing

Digital marketing still needs a lot of the same thinking as traditional marketing, but technological advances make a lot of things easier to research and deliver. Digital marketing also builds more upon relationships – as interactions in the digital world can be easier to track, it becomes easier to understand what your customers respond to.

For example, to test a brand message or product idea, a business could get feedback on social media – through a Facebook page or Twitter account, asking for information from customers and the public for free. While not as scientific as a research study, for someone like a hairstylist or shop proprietor, finding out when most of their customers would like them to be available (Saturday evenings or Sunday evenings, for example) delivers real benefit. Supportive and engaged customers, once you win their trust, are often the best advocates for your business and can help you to understand how to make more money from them if you create and nurture the proper relationship.

If you are trying to design appealing logos or graphics to distinguish a business, there are online marketplaces of design freelancers where you can peruse their offerings while still working conceptually to nail down your own approach. You can surf the web, finding competitors and studying their online approach to content and presentation, and search for marketing appearances. YouTube is an endless source of videos by both personal and business creators, some using only their phones or cheap podcasting equipment to make compelling viral videos.

And finally, because the digital attention span of humans does have limits, a digital marketer will be able to make use of digital marketing analytics tools to understand the effectiveness of a campaign, often in real time. Most search engine and social media platforms that take paid advertising have dashboards that explain how effective a reach your marketing had, how the ads were targeted and how long it took until the spend limit was reached.

OUTBOUND AND INBOUND MARKETING

Marketing can be outbound or inbound; let’s look at this.

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing, especially if you are new to the field of marketing, is what you think of most as a consumer. A company or person reaches out to you in several ways to get you to buy their goods or service through advertising, phone calls, door-to-door flyers, direct postal mailings and so on. As the consumer, this kind of marketing may seem interruptive or a side-product of a consumer society with leisure time. The business places their brand or advertisement in the consumer’s context, where they think their customers are, and without the customers expecting to see their message; for example, surprise takeover or creation of a small art gallery in London to sell your goods or promote your service, or a billboard placed on a road in Montana in the United States.

Roughly speaking, the process is:

1. Create a campaign that appeals to as broad an audience as you can (to increase the chances of hitting your customer).
2. Time the campaign to capture attention in a certain venue, place or context (ads on the subway, flyer in the home letterbox).
3. Determine from the volume of sales or service bookings during and after the campaign whether it worked.
4. Start up a new campaign again as you decide you need more customers.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing, by contrast, is a term coined by HubSpot chief executive officer (CEO) Brian Halligan, but identical in principle to the ideas put forth by Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing (1999).¹ Godin felt that the most effective methods of marketing got the customers’ buy-in or consent. Other US marketers, including HubSpot, have promoted the ‘get found’ approach. In the digital realm, a digital marketer creates and provides content for a company blog, podcast, ebook or email list that the interested customer can sign up for. With such an approach, the business...