Digital Marketing: Overview

Historically there have been only a handful of vehicles available to deliver your marketing message to the public and your potential customers. These methods are usually resource intensive and typically have taken a long time to produce.

We will call these outbound marketing techniques.
In just the last ten years there has been an explosion of new ways to market to your customers.

…and the list goes on. It goes without saying marketing has come a long way in a very short time.

So how do we manage all of these available channels and know which is best and if we are getting the best ROI for our marketing dollar? That’s the real trick isn't it. More than anything, it takes your time and careful planning.

Problems with Traditional Outbound Marketing Methods:

I. Cost
Over time, and as marketing budgets shift and adjust, these traditional marketing techniques are becoming more and more costly. For instance a direct mail campaign sent to a purchased, “demographically targeted”, list of 250,000 homes in the Chicago area costs around $50k designed, printed and sent. A full page ad in the news paper on a Saturday can cost up to $40k and that’s only for the media buy.

II. Tracking/Testing
So, say we’ve spent 2 months designing a direct mail piece and close to $50k buying the list and having it printed and mailed. How do we gauge the response? Well, we put our phone number on it, so let see who calls. Or we put the name of our website on it and we have Web Trends, but how do we know who came because of the direct mail piece? Or what if we wanted to do a test to see if a different call to action works better than the one we sent or a different headline gets a better response? By the time we go back to the designers and print again and send again we will have probably spent another $10k and 2-3 Weeks time, and we still have no real way of gauging the response or following-up in a relevant, traceable way should they have questions.

III. Avoidance.
Today the average person is bombarded with upwards of 2000 marketing messages per day. And with that has come (via the same technology that the new marketing vehicles have come) ways for consumers to block and ignore the traditional forms of advertising; Spam Filters, Ad Blockers (dirty word), Caller ID, DVR (TiVo), satellite radio, etc.

What To Do?

Consumers, both B2B and B2C are becoming much more knowledgeable about what they’re shopping for prior to contacting anyone in sales. With the amount of information available today it is way too easy to do your own research before you ever have to talk to a sales person. So given that the sales cycle for a buyer begins with that initial search for information this is the best time (and most cost effective way) to capture their attention and introduce your company/product/service to the buyer.

We will call this method, Inbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

The last ten years or so have seen an enormous influx of new marketing vehicles. The new technologies that seem to emerge each quarter have reshaped marketing as a whole. Inbound marketing is a concept that uses the reverse (or the opposite) of traditional advertising tactics to attract customers with whom you'd like to do business. To demonstrate the idea I'll use the analogy of building a campfire.
A quality campfire is constructed by acquiring:

Once the 'tee-pee' like structure is built and you have your kindle inside of it, invite your friends (your prospects and customers) light it and feed it (launch your site and promote it) until it gets hot enough to ignite the structure. For this you must keep someone by the fire at all times.

Fill your database with leads by continuously adding content that is useful to your target market and keep your employees working on it until you improve your search engine rankings and increase traffic 'organically'. Content is king, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Once the structure is ablaze you can start adding the larger logs to the mix, but don't just stack them in there any ol' way, carefully position them relative to the structure and those who have gathered by your small fire.

Once you have the leads coming in then you can start adding value to your brand and drive more traffic by distributing premium content to your subscribers via one-to-one marketing; with relevant email messages as well as other permission based communication like social media groups[like this one] and social networks. Once you've established yourself as an expert and earned the trust of an audience, then, rich media advertising and other targeted ad buys that fit their media usage profiles make more sense.

You've built a structure that can manage and track your sales and marketing together, at this point you can justify these other more costly forms of advertising because you have the ability to test at no extra cost. The feedback loop has become almost instantaneous. Over a much shorter time than it would have been just ten years ago, you are able to truly optimize your product and service offering without having to spend the majority of your time tracking down, and sorting through data. Not to mention all sales/marketing decisions can be weighed against hard data.

And once you've tuned into the right mix of marketing vehicles (fuel) that brings the most buyers, you just have to continue to provide a high level of service (stoke the coals) and your fire will burn a long, long time.