You know how it goes. Your boss reads an article on LinkedIn and announces to his team that “we need to do something ‘digital’ in our marketing activity!”. Cue the panic as each marketer tries to remember the last time they did a Twitter poll or PPC campaign and what their Google Adwords login details actually are…Senior Account Manager Katie recommends how to get started.
The truth is, while digital marketing can often seem daunting and overwhelming, it’s still marketing. The same principles of reaching your audience at the right place and at the right time are still true. The only thing is that there are many more exciting and dynamic channels to utilise. Not only this, but the low-hanging fruit is often more plentiful and can require only a small amount of investment.
It doesn’t take a great marketer to tell you that digital marketing has taken over as the media of choice in recent years. With the evolution of social media into advertisement platforms and more technical and intelligent targeting from the likes of Facebook Pixel, there are certainly plenty of tactics to choose from.
However, this is where it can get a bit overwhelming. We often think that we need to do everything – including ‘the latest thing’ – but actually, this is often where things go wrong.
Unless you have a team of digital marketers who are constantly monitoring, testing and learning from these different digital activities, it’s very hard to carry out a full digital marketing programme effectively.
So, you may want to carry out some digital marketing activity as part of your marketing plans – whether that means dipping your toe for the first time, or developing your existing programme. The answer? Less is more. Choose just a handful of digital tactics that you know you can deploy (and deploy well) and, crucially, analyse and learn from them.
The beauty of digital marketing is the ability to quickly and accurately analyse performance, so unless you’re going to learn from your successes (and failures), then you’re missing a trick.
