Change is always upon us in the digital marketing world. Trying to stay on top of the speed of change is something business owners and marketers both worry about.
Transitioning into 2020 has been quite the rocky road with COVID-19 showing its full effects on all business. In the digital world we realise that measuring our online efforts is a lot harder than we first thought. Pin pointing exactly where to spend our budget isn’t as simple as it seems.
Digital Marketing still has better metrics than traditional Marketing
The rise of digital led us to believe that all marketing activities could be measured, ensuring that every dollar could be invested in the right marketing activities. Compared to traditional marketing techniques or above the line marketing, there are a lot less grey areas and this is somewhat true for Digital Marketing.
The journey for hard metrics was every digital marketers dream. However, we now can better understand that there is huge complexity of the buyer journey in most industries. The channels available to the target market, the multi-device usage, and the greater importance of remarketing and retargeting.
In reality, it’s very hard to be certain of the impact of all digital marketing activities. Hence why, long-term digital marketing should be implemented rather than dollar-in-dollar-out expectations.
This shouldn’t just apply to the traditional longer-term marketing strategies such as SEO and content creation, but also paid channels such as Facebook, Google & Youtube. These channels have generally been viewed as short term pure performance channels.
Support customers on their buyer journey rather then worrying about strict ROI.
Increased time and effort should be spent on these activities, I know in my own experiences working for clients with large advertising budgets on Social Media, the results only get better over time. Building on the customer journey rather than pure ROI.
Quality time and effort should be spent on activities introducing people to a brand and actually supporting them in the early and middle stages of their buyer journey, rather than worrying about strict ROI at the bottom of the funnel. So what does this actually mean? Well, essentially business will need to align marketing efforts with the real-word buyer journey.
So where to from here?
Next year will bring loads of change in digital marketing including the way we measure and interpret data, as every year has for the past two decades. In saying this, loads will remain the same.
- Investing in longer term with digital advertising channels rather than just SEO and Content
- Aligning marketing efforts with the customer journey
Thank you for stopping by and having a read.
