Some basics into how digital and traditional marketing are alike

Once upon a time  I did an MBA and I had a very clear goal in my mind; I wanted to learn how IT and (traditional) Marketing were converging to pave the way to Digital Marketing. But why you might ask? in my mind digital was not a trend, it was here to stay. And ANY future marketing strategy (yes, even the most unthinkable B2B ones) are prone to have a digital marketing component to it.

I will be creating a number of related posts that talk that about digital marketing: its basics, the more intrinsic strategy (concepts and principles) and implementation of ia digital marketing strategy with the tools to be used

To start of we can talk about some 3 basics in digital marketing, that are much closer to traditional marketing than we think:

1. Your Marketing basics are the same for any digital marketing campaign (yay!!): You need to identify your Segment(s), Targetand Positioning before creating a Marketing Communications campaign of any form. Of-course after you have selected your target audience you need to select your distribution channel, i.e: Which platforms will you use to reach this target? That’s where understanding the different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, snapchat etc) and the demographics of its users is important. (I’ll get more into the definition of a Digital Ecosystem later on in this blog.) Of course once the STP part is done, you can get into strategy and tactics.
2. The beauty about Digital Marketing is the measurability it offers. Here’s the trickier part, there’s a huge number of data that’s available for any given campaign. Naturally, being able to view things like open-click rate, unbounce rate, social media shares, comments amongst other measurements, gives any marketer great feedback.  However, knowing how to analyze it and transferring this to actionable items is even more difficult. That’s where Google Analytics and the individual platform insights become your best friends in this area. Digital marketing is an iterative process (otherwise called AB testing of sorts), you will have to test the grounds for some of the campaigns you will launch to later understand what is working best, and what is not. From all the data you receive on Google Analytics you can for example see where your SEO is performing the best. Whether you are getting a higher percentage of acquisitions  from organic SEO, paid SEO, owned social media or direct links. You will also be able to track any conversion goals that you’ve set from the beginning .

Nonetheless, in order to interpret any data, you must have set some goals previously, and some benchmarks to understand whether you’re being successful in your efforts.

3. Having clear-cut objectives is everything!! Defining you business objectives and how these overlap with your digital ecosystem is absolutely crucial. Just like in any traditional marketing strategy, one of the first things you want to do is have a well-defined set of goals. The major difference here is that your digital marketing objectives will vary depending on the medium you are using for any campaign, and the kind of business you’re in of course. Something I’ve learned along the way, is that when it comes to defining your objectives and defining the KPI’s to measure those objectives, you will have to work hand-in-hand with your I.T department. More often than not, as a marketer you will define those business objectives that surround each one of your digital initiatives (social media pages, website, a display ad campaign), and you will consult with your I.T department as to choosing the best KPI’s to measure the success of any of your digital initiatives and more importantly, setting those specific KPI targets. It’s definitely an iterative process that will have a trial and error period embedded.

Here are some examples of potential objectives based on the kind of business:

• E-commerce website:if you have an e-commerce website, one of the most important objectives here will be getting a customer to put in an order in her/her shopping cart or otherwise selling online. Therefore, your objectives will be more aligned with: revenueand average order value. Once a person has gone through with a purchase, this will count towards your website’s conversion rate.
• A brick-and-mortar-store:Having a physical store rather than an e-tailer means that you will most probably use your digital mediums to increase brand awareness. Increasing brand awareness can be measured by a number of different actions that are taken by the visitors to say: your website or Facebook page. For example, a top goal here can be to drive store visits, which can be measured by  number of printed coupons, visitors searching the “find a store location.
• An online newsletter that complements your offline business:It’s clear that your tactics in this example will have a main goal to drive engagement. Here your objectives will most probably include measuring a combination of visitors to your webpage, subscription to your newsletter, shares of an article (or e-newsletter) on say your LinkedIn page.

Traditional and online marketing still have many basic concepts that are commonly shared. And a lot of the new tactics that are driven by online marketing could be easily understood by using common sense. I’ll be going more in depth into the different tactics, lingo and other interesting topics in digital marketing in my future posts.