Digital Channels

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Reaching priority audiences

It's important to think about who exactly is your core target audience. Think of it as a bull's eye segment of people that you want to reach with your communication. Digital enables you to understand who they are, understand how effective it is, and then deliver more of the same communication through things like marketing automation, for example.

This has the following results:

• Reduces resource wastage: You can reach priority audiences whilst also reducing the resource wastage that may be a consequence of traditional communications.
• Improves brand image: By using a medium that is attractive to the core target audience, you can forge a greater relationship and understanding with that target audience. It'll have a positive affiliation to your brand.
• Enhances user tracking capabilities: In terms of tracking capabilities, digital is superior to traditional channels.

For example, let's contrast a sales web advert or an ad banner on Yahoo with a traditional TV campaign. Now, in traditional TV you can have a regional TV campaign or aspect. However, you don't generally know how effective that TV campaign has been on sales within that particular region. Some of the key issues that may arise is you don't quite know if the person who's bought the product has been exposed to that TV advert, for example. Or you're not quite sure what other things are going on in the ether which may have impacted on a person's purchase decision to buy that various product or service.

Now, think about it from an ad banner point of view. You know exactly who's seen it because you have that insight because you can see how many people have gone on to that various page. You can also then see or track it through to the end result. You can see how many people have clicked on that banner, how many people have then gone to your website, and then finally, how many people have gone on to purchase your product.

Be aware no tracking mechanism is foolproof! And in fact, even the digital communications can have drawbacks, too. So, for example, the last click effect is one that's traditionally cited as a major drawback of digital comments. An organization would attribute 100% of the effectiveness of that purchase or sale to that click, though that happened a few moments ago. Now clearly in reality, a consumer may have been exposed to a number of different channels. And yet if you only attribute the sale to that one final channel, then you're clearly missing the majority of the picture. So we need to be careful about how we understand and track our various organization, our various consumer interactions, and then attribute them to have these commercial values.

Aligning channels to objectives

In every single campaign, return on investment (ROI) is becoming an extremely important measure to use to determine the effectiveness of that communication. You need to consider the cost of the campaign and the core business objectives when determining whether the campaign has been a success or not.

Traditionally, people, particularly in social media, think that there's no cost attributed to developing great campaigns. And that isn't true! No matter how cost-effective it is, developing great communications across these mediums does take time, effort, and resources, and these all affect the budget. Make sure you're clear about the business objectives. What exactly are you trying to drive?

Also, beware of of jumping on the band wagon when it comes to the latest digital tool or technique. Understand exactly what your organization needs from a communication platform or communication strategy. Understand how it then links to the business objectives, and from that point onwards, you can start to determine the most appropriate creative or message and also what the most appropriate channel would look like as well.

You have to take a multi-dimensional approach to developing your campaigns based on a strong foundation of exactly what are the costs and the objectives. And finally, make sure that you've got tracking in place to be able to observe the level of output that you then have as a consequence of it.

Benefits

Digital communications have a number of benefits:

• Saves time and money: There are various reasons why digital can be more cost-effective than television. The cost of production and creation of some of these assets, again, can be way more cost-effective as well. So we can save time and money.
• Offers better technology: You can offer that two-way communication flow as opposed to that one-way which traditional comms gives you.
• Taps into expert services: You can link into affiliate networks which may be similar to yours or add value to the service that you're trying to drive through. Consider a simple financial services product. You may be able to link in with other services, say a citizen’s advice bureau. And that could be a nice way to add value to your customers.
• Provides an unbiased perspective: You can push expert knowledge pieces into the forefront. And you can draw on customers' perspectives to tell people in an unbiased way exactly what some of the drawbacks and positive points are.
• Utilizes multiple channels: You can reach out to a much greater audience than you perhaps sort of had traditionally.
• Unleashes creativity: You can be more creative because you are developing an appropriate channel mix. And as part of that channel mix, you need to think about the creative message that's being delivered.
• Can be scaled as needed: You have to look no further than doing a simple AdWord campaign or even a Facebook advert to understand that you can be very directed about the number of people that you want this advert to be put in front of. You can expand that based on the level of impact that you're having and the amount of ROI that you're receiving as a consequence to that advert.