Explode Digital Marketing Success in 5 Powerful Ways

Did you know there are ways to explode digital marketing success by recognizing how it differs from traditional media strategies? Yesterday, I began expanding on a post originally published in 2012, and today I’d like to wrap up that discussion by identifying five more ways you can explode your digital marketing success.

Explode digital marketing success

Since 2012, there’s been a movement to shift conversations to digital media rather than social media or social networking, which was the focus in the original post. This change, rather than just reflecting semantics, celebrates the integration of digital strategies, including blogging, e-commerce, social media, and email marketing, with a stronger commitment to driving ROI, including strategies involving lead generation, tracking movement through a website, etc. These changes further enhance the distinction between traditional media and social networking by creating metrics to measure results and provide insights to improve market performance. Metrics are woefully absent from traditional media due to the nature of the communication channels.

1. Rich analytics

Probably the biggest change from 2012 is the emphasis on analytics, which reflects a major difference between traditional media and digital marketing. With traditional media, we know next to nothing about how successful our campaign was because the tools for tracking performance, with the exception of direct media, are inferential. When using traditional media, we’re lucky if we can get data on reach. Other data, such as attitude toward the brand, recall, and purchase intentions, have little to do with your ability to explode digital marketing success and require expensive, time-consuming market research.

With digital media, the marketer is inundated with data. Now, the challenge is making sense of it all. With AI, analyzing data to explode digital marketing success is even easier. Instead of drowning in data, AI tools help create reports and dashboards that would take months using manual tools, clean data effortlessly, and provide insights that manual processing might have overlooked.

Here are just a few of the metrics available:

• Vanity metrics such as reach, frequency, likes, shares, etc. Although these metrics don’t contribute much toward reaching the goal to explode digital marketing success, they do point to your ability to reach and engage your market with your strategies.
• Deep customer insights such as demographics (age, gender), geographics (mobile, country, city), and, importantly, psychographics (personality, lifestyle, groups). This data allows you to build market personas that improve your communication efforts, translating into higher ROI.
• Success insights, such as conversion rates, average order size, and loyalty (which we can segment by source, demographics, etc.), help guide decisions.
• Source analytics, such as the source of visits, source of conversions, movement through the website, etc that allow you to determine which marketing efforts are most successful. You can even use this data to determine whether your posts meet minimum ROI goals, especially if you tag each post to refine data.
• Competitor analysis in much more depth

2. On-the-spot visuals

When I worked with an ad agency on Madison Avenue (the NY mecca for advertising), graphic designers spent days editing photographs taken by some of the world’s best photographers and producers with Hollywood credits and made commercials with award-winning actors. I once watched a designer use Photoshop to painstakingly remove every pixel of the full-body tattoo on a model from a photo shoot when the client decided they didn’t want a woman with a tattoo in their ad. It took nearly a week of work!

Digital marketing has a similar need for visuals, but this type of media moves at a speed that ad agencies could never match — it’s like a race between the tortoise and the hare, only in this version, the hare wins. A social media manager might need something in 20 minutes to take advantage of an opportunity or to counter a complaint voiced on a social platform.

There’s no time for highly skilled designers to create the images and videos that the manager needs NOW. That means marketers need to create visuals on the spot. They don’t have time to get a second major in design and a third in filmmaking to accomplish this goal. They also don’t have time to gain years of experience in image creation, filming, and composition.

That changes how a campaign comes together. No longer do you have an art department, a music department, and a post-production department. You need folks who bring multiple skills to the campaign. That means content marketers need not only writing skills but the ability to craft images on the fly (edit existing images or create images using Photoshop, Canva, or other tools). They need a little HTML/CSS so they can make the content look awesome online.

Video is the same way. You create a number of videos without the benefit of scriptwriters, storyboarding, and editing. There’s no time for that. Instead, you need folks who can create videos on a tight budget and upload them to YouTube, which might require some HTML/CSS.

So, what’s the solution if you want to explode digital marketing success for your brand?

Canva is one option, especially since digital users don’t expect the same professionalism as you might see with traditional marketing. In fact, digital users prefer authentic content produced by brands and influencers to the polished look created by skilled professionals. They want informal settings and language to be something polished through levels of bureaucracy.

Canva is an online tool that helps even those without inherent design expertise create great images and, now, videos. Using templates and pre-built image sizes that match various marketing needs, along with thousands of images, anyone can create visual products in minutes, not weeks. There’s a free version of the tool, or you can get a pro version for around $120/ year that includes more templates and images. All the content you produce is easily shared on social platforms or downloadable for use in any format needed.

AI helps explode digital marketing success by making it easier to create all types of assets, including images and video. In fact, I used Gemini from Google to create the image at the top and ChatGPT to create the image above with just a few keystrokes.

Here’s what you see in tools for on-demand visual creation:

• Hundreds of templates that you can personalize for all your ideas
• Millions of FREE images and illustrations to choose from
• An option to have your videos exported, scheduled, and published anywhere 
• An array of video type options: TikTok Video, Video Slideshow, Video Collage, YouTube Video, Instagram Stories, and many more
• The opportunity to collaboratively design your images with your friends and family, all at the same time

3. Other content creation

You need more than visuals to explode digital marketing success. You need text that promotes your brand, encourages conversion, and addresses questions/ concerns. Not only do you need content, you need a lot of it, published on a consistent basis. For instance, you should publish fresh content on your website at least once a week, daily on most social media platforms, and send email broadcasts once or twice a month (maybe more, if data supports that frequency).

While most advertising (traditional media) is designed for mass consumption, social media involves one-on-one marketing. That means messages are highly targeted at specific groups, often called personas, that offer rich insights into your various target markets. We discussed this targeting in the post from yesterday with respect to digital advertising.

When I worked with a big-time advertising agency, we’d spend months preparing a campaign — crafting a message, shooting footage, editing images, carefully planning our media spend, etc. There’s no time for that in today’s rapidly changing digital landscape, where you have to produce fresh content on a consistent basis, not a few times a year.

Managing the process of crafting unique content on a consistent basis is challenging since speed and flexibility are essential. At the same time, you need an approval process to ensure your content fits your brand in terms of style and messaging while not offending or damaging your brand image. For instance, check out this Tweet from ASUS that brought the wrong type of attention to their brand. An appropriate approval process would have caught this blatant mistake.

However, in the digital space, users expect more than to see ads that match their needs. They need deep personalization if you want to explode digital marketing success. That means integrating across digital platforms to allow users to select the devices and platforms they want for various stages of the purchase decision. It also means they receive targeted email messages based on their behaviors and personas. Such segmented messages are more effective in terms of engagement and ROI than unsegmented messages.

4. Listening

Listening is important to explode digital marketing success. Unlike traditional media, often termed push marketing, companies push their messages on the market; digital media is a two-way communication channel, termed pull marketing, that involves listening and responding to the market as much as talking to them. Users can comment on and share content, which increases the post’s reach. They can also create content related to your brand. Responding to these efforts not only supports your brand but also encourages future efforts on your behalf. That’s especially true for complaints or problem queries, as the faster you respond, the better the outcome.

5. Agility and longevity

You explode digital marketing success when you recognize that digital marketing involves becoming agile and is durable. A mistake can be very costly, since a damaging comment made by your company might stick around forever (just ask politicians who are forced to address comments made decades ago).

Agility also means you can tweak your efforts along the way, rather than being stuck with your initial efforts.

There’s still a place for traditional media

You explode digital marketing success not by simply adopting the principles of digital media, but by combining newer digital media effectively with traditional media. For instance, digital media suffers from the low barriers to entry that cast suspicion on the content that doesn’t exist to the same level with traditional media.

Similarly, traditional media offers another way to engage with your target market, especially when that market might not use digital media as effectively. For instance, some international and older consumers might prefer traditional media.

Conclusion

1. Do you see other differences between traditional media and digital marketing?
2. How are you achieving success in digital marketing?

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