Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is marketing delivered through digital channels.We usually don't do the distinction between digital and non-digital marketing,we just obviously are specialized in digital channels.For me digital marketing is using digital channels to reach your audienceand there's a lot of them now, they can be search engines, websites, apps, email, social, display...I like to think of digital marketing in four ways.You've got the owned channels – it's your website, it's your mobile app,it could be your physical store, for example.Earned marketing is the concept of your consumers,if they're happy,writing reviews and sharing content on your behalf,where you don't have to pay for that.And then paid marketing is really the world ofadvertising where you're spending money to get a message in front of a person.Then there's direct marketing, which is once you have a consumer as a businessyour ability to then reach out to them more directly through channels likeemail, through direct marketing or a phone conversation.Marketing has been in place for many years – very successful in terms of offline channels that have beenused, whether that might be direct marketing, TV, radio kind of channels.But digital marketing over the last few years has really exploded in terms of growth and impact.The big shift has really been for the availability oftechnologies like mobile phones as well as the fact that we're now connected to one another.You're carrying your mobile phone with you at all times and digitalmarketing in some channels have a high capacity of finding the right personbecause as you browse, as you use your phone, or your computer, you're leavingbreadcrumbs, traces of the things that you like and the things that you do.And all those things become tools for us to find you as an audience, as a potentialcustomer, for – you know – a brand or a product.So it could be that through past browsing behaviour...a number of users have exhibited a behaviour aroundbeing in market to buy some shoes or trainers, so then you can actually pay tomarket to them in display advertising regardless of where the website is.So it's kind of removing the context of the website and following the userrather than the site itself. One of the things that's really holding manybusinesses back from embracing this change – there's still some of the oldorganizational silos that they have, where marketing do one thing then thesales team do the other and the service team do the next. So if you think aboutthis in the context of what the customer need is, and then rallying yourselvesaround those customer needs rather than marketing as a function, then you'llarguably be better placed than most large organizations today to adapt to that change.Most of the brands are still figuring out how to create a goodcombination of digital channels, and traditional channels as well in theirmarketing strategies. A good combination in a way that those channels arecomplementary to each other and not just repeating the same content in a different format.Through digital – especially social channels, or even if you have an app,or anything like that – you can create that two-waycommunication and that allows you to create not only communication butservices and products and things that will make people's lives easier so themarketing starts to leak out of the just promotion part of it, and starts tocreate things that are actually valuable for people's lives.