News in Digital Marketing this week
Marketing spend
The first article for today’s talk covering all the news in digital marketing for the week comes from Business2Community from Dan Moyle covering the perennial questions facing businesses on how much to spend for digital marketing. According to the article:
The U.S. Small Business Administration suggests allocating 7-to-8% of your gross revenue to marketing. Then you spend 50% of that marketing budget on digital marketing specifically.
Of course, newer companies trying to break into the market often find they need to spend more than their peers to start getting some traction, while smaller businesses may find they need a larger budget to compete against larger businesses in their niche. Hence, there are serious limitations to the percentage of sales model for determining your advertising budget.
When I started out with a direct marketing firm (the precursors of digital marketing) we used the objective/ task method of determining marketing budgets. We considered how many sales or leads our client wanted, the anticipated response rate, and worked back to how much it would cost to reach that many people. That works in digital marketing today, where we have some notion of lift based on prior advertising campaigns.
Also, consider that you need to reach a certain level before your advertising returns anything. It’s like priming a pump before you get water. Put in too little and you never reach the point where you get water and the effort you put in is wasted. In general, marketers argue that members of your target market need 8 exposures before taking action.
Basically, a firm needs to create an engaging and motivating campaign, execute that campaign, then monitor performance to determine whether their results meet expectations. If not, the answer may be to increase the budget for the campaign (if your reach and frequency are too low) or tweak your message to drive more results (if your lift is too low).
Pathways to digital marketing success
Our next news in digital marketing comes from Industry Week by Mike Hicks and shares pathways to digital marketing success. The post starts with the realization that everyone is in digital marketing today, even if you don’t own any digital platforms.
The post highlights 4 pathways to digital marketing success:
- SEO
- PPC
- Email marketing
- Social media
SEO or search engine optimization turns your content into traffic to your website. By selecting appropriate keywords that reflect consumer intent and crafting content to capitalize on these keywords you help Google serve up your links to users who are looking for your products and services.
PPC is pay-per-click advertising which commonly refers to Google Ads (formerly Adwords). Again, this revolves around keywords and advertising money to send traffic to your website.
Email marketing is actually a two-prong strategy involving first gaining subscribers then using the list to generate leads and/ or sales to support your brand. Notice in the graphic below, email marketing has the highest ROI of the other marketing strategies.
Finally, social media involves building communities and engaging those communities to amplify the brand’s messaging to similar new audiences as well as providing endorsements that drive purchase.
Social media in the arts
Here’s a unique take on digital marketing and how it’s changed the arts world. This post from Rolling Stone on how the music world changed in a digital world. The same changes are happening in the world of film. Gone are the days when you sent demos or headshots to agents and managers in hopes of becoming the next STAR. The road to stardom now goes through social networks like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram’s new platform Reels.
Artists are going straight to their market — consumers, rather than through traditional channels. I know my daughter and her partner own a small production company and enter their indie films in festivals and on social in hopes that a casting agent or producer sees their work then hires them. Indie authors now make more money through sales on Amazon than going through an agent and, once they have a loyal reader base, agents and publishers pick them up to increase book sales dramatically. Artists have their own vehicle to reach directly to customers through Etsy.
News in digital marketing trends
We’re only a little more than halfway through the year, yet the Telegraph Herald, through Two Rivers Digital Marketing, came out this week with its list of trends in digital marketing. Here we go:
- SEO structured data
- The rapid rise in the use of TikTok
- CRM or customer relationship management and employing business intelligence to help your CRM pay off
- Increased concerns over data privacy
A final word on the news in digital marketing
From my own website, our top post this week was on future-proofing your business. Using the example of the US auto industry and its refusal to understand the threat wrought by the Japanese as the external environment (in this case gas shortages) changed the buying habits of its primary customers. Here’s how that played out:
In response to these threats, Detroit (the seat of the US auto industry) did virtually nothing. They shook their fists at politicians to restrict imports of cars while continuing to manufacture large land crafts that got gallons/ mile in contrast to Japanese small cars with their fuel efficiency. Plus, Japanese cars began surpassing the quality of American-made cars. The net result of this failure to recognize the future was devastating. Detriot became a ghost town and the American auto industry never regained its prominence as the car of choice in the US — a 50-year mistake.
The article looks at factors creating a threat to markets in the 21st century and recommends market sensing as a tool to help future proof your business. Importantly, the article discusses why making necessary changes is so hard and how to implement changes with a minimum of fuss.
So, that’s the news in digital marketing for the week
Come back next week as we recap the most impactful posts in digital marketing for the week. Feel free to drop links in the comments if you find other articles worthy of including in our weekly recap of the news in digital marketing.
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