Digital Marketing Trends and the Importance of Brand

There are several digital marketing trends underway; some are new and some not so new; the headline is that marketers need to become more effective at content development and stay focused on their brand. Digital metrics can be misleading, look more closely at what digital measures indicate and whether they relate to business performance – focus on quality over quantity.

1. Invest in Thought Leadership to Improve Digital Marketing.

There is a lot more at stake with large price point purchases resulting in more fear in the decision-making process. A leading social network provider, LinkedIn, recently conducted a survey to learn more about the B2B buying process revealing a few surprises and reinforcing the importance of the sales process. This also applies to larger price point consumer purchases like the consumer durables category.

• 49% B2B marketers believe that thought leadership builds trust in their organization and a resounding 82% of potential clients believe this even more strongly.
• Only 17% of marketers believe that thought leadership reduces the risk of the buying process compared to 32% of potential customers surveyed.

2. The Sustainability of New Content is Challenging.

Contrast the success and profitability of the Disney blockbuster strategy to the New York Times newspaper model – compare the two stock prices. Building on their proven brand assets, the Disney content strategy is successful due to several factors:

• Bigger bets on fewer things – Disney released only 13 movies driving $6B in revenue.
• Familiarity – The Star Wars franchise, Toy Story 4 etc. They minimize risks, more than half of their revenue is derived from monetizing their back calendar.
• Accessibility – Disney focusses on monetizing their intellectual property rather than reinventing the wheel

3. The Demise of Hyper-targeting. 

This is about distribution of your marketing message as brand managers can be obsessed about ad targeting – digital advertising often sells itself on the false promise of ‘zero waste’. This often has the opposite effect as digital media buying often leads to irrelevant placement especially when programmatic digital media buying is used. Word has it that even the global branding giant, Procter & Gamble has scaled back on digital media buying due to its lack luster results. For B2B marketers, it is even more important to achieve ‘relevant reach’ to target potential customers than getting your message out to everyone, everywhere. Impressions do not necessarily result in greater market share.

4. The Economics of Cost per Connection.

Recall the financial services model of customer lifetime value. There is some merit in bringing this back to increase the performance of digital marketing campaign measurement. Consumer on-line behaviour as measured through CTR, CPC, and B2B Cost per Lead generation does not typically translate to revenue and profit. To quote Einstein, “Not everything that can be counted counts.”

We urge digital marketers to start measuring “Connection Density” – offline behaviour by connecting purchase behaviour to online behavjour. In addition, how connected different groups of people are to each other and how relevant their behaviour is to your brand category. This is an especially important consideration for social marketing campaign development and management.

In conclusion, although digital marketing appears to be more measureable than traditional branded marketing campaigns, these measures are not always relevant to your business success. With a continued focus on brand including your intellectual property, key points of differentiation and most relevant consumer audiences, you should be able to leverage the most relevant digital marketing metrics to drive business performance.