After many months in the planning, I am delighted to post this EXCLUSIVE interview with stellar Digital Marketer Dr Dave Chaffey, to whom very many thanks!!
Dr Dave Chaffey is CEO and co-founder of Smart Insights (www.smartinsights.com), a digitalmarketing advice site that helps businesses succeed online. He is author of 5bestselling books on Ecommerce including InternetMarketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice and has been recognised asone of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of Marketing.
Question 1: Many companies andmanagers today are overwhelmed with all the hype around Digital Marketing. Whatpractical advice would you give them, to help get started in this area?
Yes, I thinkmany “rabbits in the headlights” moments with the growing pace of change andthe speed at which the key players introduce new features. The great thingabout digital marketing is that you can “dive in” and start small by creating ablog or Facebook page. The problem is, you’ll often then lurch to the nextlatest hype to see whether that helps. It’s currently Google+ and Pinterest forexample, this time last year it was Quora. None of these will help buildcommercial growth if you don’t get the marketing fundamentals right.
AtSmartInsights.com we're firm believers in a planned, structured approach tohelp make sure your online marketing activities are aligned with businessobjectives. Planning also really helps you prioritise on the areas you can havethe biggest impact, maybe opportunities in tactics that competitors haveignored. It's also essential to get inside customers’ minds to see what theythink, feel and do online and work out how that connects with your brand.
It’s crazyreally, with how much is invested in digital media today, how few have aplanned approach. We asked this question in a post about digital planning a couple of years ago and were not surprised to see that themajority have an ad-hoc approach. We repeated this informal poll again thisyear and found there was little change:
So, mypractical advice is “don’t just jump in”, think about what you want to achieveand how you’re going to position yourself online, to differentiate yourself. Apractical tip here, is to improve how you communicate your value propositionacross your website and social outposts. If you’re an established brand this isless necessary, but if you’re starting out, it’s essential.
See our advice oncrafting an online value proposition (OVP).
Question 4: What steps can companiestake to measure and validate the returns that they get from their DigitalMarketing investment?
See our advice oncrafting an online value proposition (OVP).
Question 2: What place do Social Mediatools have in the Digital Marketing Mix? Are they simply additional advertisingchannels or something more?
Sure, youcan think of social media platforms as advertising channels, but as you knowPeter, that’s completely missing the point. We had an interesting discussion of this topic on our LinkedIn Group just yesterday.
A studentstudying digital marketing was asking about the scope of social media and theirrelevance to marketing. The short definition from my book is that
"Social media encourage audienceparticipation, interaction and sharing"
You can seethat doesn’t sit at all well with advertising; we all know we don’t want to beadvertised to when we’re socialising. That’s not to say that advertising on thesocial platforms doesn’t have value in raising awareness and connecting withadvocates, far from it. But social media has an impact across the whole ofdigital marketing mix as you suggest.
Jen Law, oneof our expert members expressed it better, saying “Social media is about conversations, community, connecting withpersonalities and building relationships. It is not just a broadcast channel ora sales and marketing tool”.
I think it’sinteresting that in 2011-12 we are seeing company response to social mediagrowing up and many now see it more broadly and are thinking how best toharness social media marketing across the business. We’re seeing companies talkabout broader management of social media. In the same discussion, PaulFennemore, a social media specialist, said:
A purist would say 'social media' ismedia. In this case Web2.0 interactive, real-time based mediaincluding: Video, Blogs, Wikis, Gaming, Photos, Music and so on.
However, social media has come to mean than this and is not a good term forwhat it represents, Social Media Marketing, Social Commerce, Social Business,Social Enterprise are better terms depending on the context.
However, social media has come to mean than this and is not a good term forwhat it represents, Social Media Marketing, Social Commerce, Social Business,Social Enterprise are better terms depending on the context.
Here, theCEO of Burberry talks about how fundamental social media are to the way theyoperate today:
Question 3: Today, consumers areexposed to a vast amount of data. How can marketers make it easier for them tofind and hear what they need and filter out extraneous messages and information,from all the noise?
Analytics isa passion of mine thanks to my background as a scientist when I was studying inthe 1980s. It’s one of the reasons why I was attracted to Internet marketing asit was known in the mid 1990s. It seemed to offer an opportunity to understandour customers much better and deliver relevance in our communications to helpsecure better business outcomes and ROI on our media investments. Yet, sadly Ithink most companies fail to filter out the noise.
There arecertainly technical challenges with attributing influence to multiple mediaacross complex customer journeys and how we use cookies to do this. I alsothink the web analytics systems as designed, are mostly designed “by geeks, forgeeks” and they’re not structured around the questions that marketers ask –that’s why we’ve developed guides to step marketers through these questions onSmartInsights.com. But the bigger problems are todo with the classic governanceissues of people, process and systems. You need the right KPIs, dashboardstailored to your business and a regular review/action process. Out-of-the box,the analytics or social listening tools don’t give you this. Some big companiesdo get this right, here’s one example we covered:
To answeryou’re question directly, I recommend these steps:
- Define value of outcomes on your site – setup goals in GoogleAnalytics with values assigned to represent value.
- Put in place tracking of all media, on and offline,with consistent marketing source codes
- With this in place start using rarely used measures likerevenue or goal value per visit and $Index value
- Understand, at a granular level which media including sites,search terms, placement and creative create value for you.
- Maximise value, prioritising the media with the bestconversion rates and ROI.
- Understand more complex journeys through multichannel funnelsso you are crediting assists earlier in the journey rather than just “lastclick wins”
- Find solutions to assess the value within social mediamarketing – 1 to 6 will help, but specialist tools are still needed!
Question 5: As the Web evolves intothe Cloud and becomes even more pervasive, what changes do you predict for Marketing,resulting from the growth of mobile and the ubiquitous connection of lessanimate objects?
Achallenging question to end! Regardless of the cloud, I think many don’t have agood conception of the their creative assets and how to make them mosteffective. We still have this mental idea of creative placed on our site or anadvertisers site we need to use to get our message across. In 2007, I thinkthere was a lot of discussion of “atomisation” and I think this is a better wayto think of creative assets today.
My colleague, Dan Bosomworth onSmartInsights.com likes to call these “social objects” and they are thefundamental units for effective contentmarketing today. They are incrediblyeffective in some markets such as tech products and fashion. Companies likeHubspot, Eloqua in B2B, ASOS, Burberry in Fashion are masters in creatingeffective assets and campaigns around these which expand their reach andpreference and link through to commercial goals. There are examples from manysectors though.
For me a solid content marketing strategy is key to onlinesuccess today and it’s fundamental to success in search, social, email marketingand conversion. It unifies brand communications in disparate channels. So ifyou don’t have a content strategy you’re falling behind.
We finddiscussions of the potential of mobile marketing are some of the most popularon our blog, whether this is about QR codes, mobile apps or effective mobiledesign. It certainly gives increased opportunities for connecting withconsumers in a more personal way, but I can’t see examples where how a companydeploys mobile marketing has transformed their brand in the way that contentand social media have for some of the examples above.
At some levels a mobileor tablet device is just an alternative to the desktop platformand gives achannel choice for similar content and experience. It doesn’t give so manybrands so many new opportunities to engage. But I’d like to hear of moreexamples, particularly around proximity or location-based marketing withexperiential marketing events. This iswhere it can give companies an edge.
Lookingfurther into the future, more objects will be web-enabled whether that’s cars,household items or people! PR Smith talked about this in our EmarketingExcellence book as earlier as 2001 about the Post-PC customer.
We haven’t seenreal progress in this area although the Verichip was touted as an implantable RFID chip. Health and privacy concerns seemed tohave stopped it and I’m not too sorry about that – I think we all need tounplug sometime!
It will happen, but “not in my lifetime”.
Useful links and resources:
If readersof this post would like to learn more about digital marketing, we've created aframework on Smart Insights which can help marketers explore a topic withoutbeing reliant on Google or Wikipedia.
Here are the starting points I'drecommend:
Our home page has a widgetwe developed based on the PRACE framework to exploreover 200 digital marketing techniques
For a quick scan of alltechniques try our Best Practices review- grouped in 25 key marketing activities
We also have a Digital Marketing Strategy Guide and simplifiedmarketing planning framework.
Find out more about our Ebooksand training courses.
Thank you Dr Chaffey!
A brief overview
