Think Digital Marketing … with sound support.
It’s Dynamic, Exciting, Works in real time and finally enables consumers or business buyers to engage with their suppliers on their terms.
All true descriptors of Digital Marketing, of course, and opportunities for creative marketers to demonstrate their innovative ideas and approaches with the added advantage of low costs per contact.
No wonder so many – perhaps all – keen marketers want to talk only about Digital Marketing now.
Well respected ESP, Adestra commented at TFM last week that “personalisation is not only highly effective, but it’s expected by today’s consumers”. Jane Cave, MD at the IDM, added “The digital world we all now live and work in has potential customer touchpoints everywhere, whether online, on your mobile or in-person. Each one of these touchpoints can create a piece of data that marketers can use to better understand their customer”.
Jane summed up more succinctly than we the theme of our blog today: digital marketing is indeed the most exciting development in the communication lifecycle – but it still should sit on a solid foundation of (traditional) marketing skills – insight-led planning, carefully considered campaign management, sound dialogue creation and robust follow-through. The core best practices for handling marketing data apply more than ever – digital marketing gives you more contact opportunities so more chance to gather data. And you have to handle it properly once you’ve gathered it – that need does not go away!
You also need to ensure the data you rely on to drive your personalisation is complete, accurate, up to date and centralised. Make sure that having more contact opportunities doesn’t lead to embarrassing mistakes!
The greater the opportunity to drive personalised communications – the greater the opportunity to cock up. For a little illustration of that – see our previous blog!
So always think of digital marketing as the best evolution (so far) of marketing communications – not a revolution which discards all previous learnings.
