We’re living in a digital world – with more and more people using mobile phones, tablets, laptops and computers to consume the sorts of things they used to get from print newspapers and magazines and their TV and radio sets. Businesses need to go where their audiences are and so that means digital marketing if you’re going to keep up. Although it’s nothing new, digital marketing has become a major game changer for both brands and consumers.

Digital marketing is a huge win for global brands. Campaigns based on digital technologies provide quantifiable results like none before, and the multi-channel world opens up endless possibilities for executing complex marketing strategies.

The pace of change in digital marketing can be quite overwhelming. To keep up, digital marketers need to look at their strategies and find ways to mimic this pace. In many cases, that means we need to adopt a more short-term perspective.

1. Identify the right metrics – Stop presenting, start engaging

This will depend on what you want to achieve but there are some common things you’ll probably want. Most basically you’ll want to see how many people are coming to your site. Beyond that you also want to look at where that traffic comes from, your ‘bounce rate’ of how many people immediately leave your site, the demographics of your audience and your all-important search engine ranking.

According to Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post’s successful disruption of the media landscape was based on the recognition that it’s no longer enough to just ‘present’ information to its audience. Huffington Post will be 10 years old on May 9 2015 and today maintains 850 journalists and editors, along with thousands of bloggers, writing up to 2000 stories a day. Under a new joint venture with Fairfax, the site will also launch in Australia later this year, bringing its total country tally up to 14 (Cameron, 2015).

The key to be success is you need to move increasingly into engaged marketing. Presentations are not enough anymore, we need to engage customers.

2. Combining old and new method

Friedlein (2015) has run an experiment according to “Mail Man” campaign which conceived by Publicis Chemistry, ran across digital, print, outdoor, and direct mail; whereas he decides to combine direct mail with digital and social media. The idea was simply to use what we digerati call a GOL (Good Old-fashioned Letter) to prompt a tracked visit to my LinkedIn profile with the desired action being a request to connect with him.

With 2000 letters sent and total cost of £1,500, up to date there have been 188 uses of the custom URL so a 9.4% response rate with 56% of those views coming within the first two days of the letters landing. He had received 156 new LinkedIn connections from those he sent the letter to, so a 7.8% conversion rate and an average cost per new connection of £9.60.

What he has learnt is due to data protection and marketing, you cannot legally cold email people. In B2B it is a little greyer but even if you get away with it you get so little response and risk such reputational damage that it is not worth it.

BUT YOU CAN MAIL PEOPLE! Using direct mail to win a digital connection and permission to contact in the future seems to me a clever way to join up traditional and digital.  Here are some most interesting personal replies and comments, particularly from digital professionals extolling the virtues of a letter:

“Great to receive your LETTER, what a breath of fresh air” Senior Ecommerce Manager;

“You sent me a letter – old skool. I liked it.” Marketing Director.

Of my new connections 18 are Marketing Directors at major brands and 33 are Ecommerce/Digital Directors so the quality is very high too.

3. Money

Money plays the most vital part for your business but is it the right measurement for your successful digital marketing campaign? The one that makes you money?

Once you’ve got all the data you need you should focus on at two figures. Firstly what is the ‘cost per lead’ from your campaign? How much have you spent and how many leads have you generated?

Green (2015) explains by looking at the “lead to close ratio” or conversion rate. So if you have spent £50 and generated 10 leads that means you  have spent £5 on each lead. However, if half of those leads actually become customers spending money on your products and services then that will be five customers at £10 each. If each customer has spent above that you’re in profit. If it is below there could be two problems:

• your marketing campaign has failed to generate enough interest.
• you have not managed to get those who showed an interest to part with their cash.

If it is the second one, your campaign might actually a success and you may need to reconsider what you once do that draw their interest. Number of customers do not reflect your real success.

Oh! And also do not forget to ask your audience what they think. Their useful feedback might help to decide your future efforts.

References

Cameron, N. (2015). 3 lessons to inspire digital marketing success from Arianna Huffington. [online] CMO. Available at: http://www.cmo.com.au/article/572977/3-lessons-inspire-digital-marketing-success-from-arianna-huffington/ [Accessed 28 Apr. 2015].

Friedlein, A. (2015). My experiment in combining direct mail with digital/social. [online] Econsultancy. Available at: https://econsultancy.com/blog/66375-my-experiment-in-combining-direct-mail-with-digital-social/ [Accessed 28 Apr. 2015].

Green, C. (2015). How to measure the success of your digital marketing campaign | Information Age. [online] InformationAge. Available at: http://www.information-age.com/technology/mobile-and-networking/123459266/how-measure-success-your-digital-marketing-campaign [Accessed 28 Apr. 2015].

Royal Mail MarketReach, (2015). Mailmen. Available at: https://youtu.be/eoigzO5tXdc [Accessed 28 Apr. 2015].