Digital Marketing Success Means More than Shifting Marketing Spend

By Graeme Foux, founder & CEO at Knexus

In a marketplace weighed down by poor sales performance, online appears be a rare silver lining. Time and again companies report continuing growth online whilst faltering elsewhere. Google recently demonstrated this resilience, posting positive earnings for the fourth quarter of 2008.

For marketers faced with shrinking budgets and reluctant consumers, this is one of the few bright spots. So you might think, accelerate the shift in spend from traditional to digital marketing and everything will be fine. If only life and business was so simple. Marketing directors face new and unfamiliar challenges to deliver a successful digital marketing strategy. Firstly, the complexity of digital marketing and its rapid, unrelenting pace of change is a culture shock to many traditional marketers. Oh for the days of lavish advertising campaigns and huge TV audiences. In digital, the audiences are more fragmented, the campaigns require a greater mix of activities, and both the technology and consumer behavior keeps changing. Forget about a one-year strategy, digital marketing success requires careful measurement and constant adjustments to marketing plans and thinking.

A second key challenge, often unspoken in the delicately balanced eco-system between agencies and brands, is that there are insufficient agencies with the strategic digital marketing resources that major brands require. How many times have I heard marketing directors bemoan the lack of new ideas coming out of their agencies. Curiously, in some cases it’s the brands pushing the agencies to take on new digital ideas.

And of course it’s not just agencies that are racing to recalibrate their capabilities. Whilst marketers enthusiastically debate the merits of Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, the truth is that many traditional marketers are struggling to understand how to respond effectively to the social media phenomenon. In fact, brands have a major challenge across their marketing and communications teams, not only to improve understanding of the new medium of digital, but to make a mindset change around consumer expectations and the competitive threat. With tough economic conditions resulting in lower staff levels, this problem is exacerbated.

For marketing director’s, there’s a clear message here. You may well need to target more of your spend towards digital marketing, but also be prepared to change the way you operate and support your team to deliver success!

Comments

[Trevor]

Do you know what is being copied from your site?

One of the major issues that will need to be addressed regarding a push for more digital marketing is copied content. First this can tell you what your customers are interested in; therefore enabling you to better market to them. Secondly you can use it to increase traffic to your site by creating more desired content and by increasing link backs via copied content.

Trevor
www.tynt.com

[didier]

Didier Grossemy is a self made millionaire and owes his success to an in depth knowledge of Digital Marketing. Didier Grossemy is the Internet Guru that has built some of the largest brands in the world over the Internet. Didier Grossemy provides you intimate business and digital marketing knowledge. Enjoy….
Digital is no longer the "under dog" of the marketing world
Didier grossemy

campaigns and strategies are now built around digital media with digital media
becoming the
centre piece of any activity, so a digital agency really needs to work at that strategic
level with their clients-Didier grossemy