Digital Marketing Power

There’s a common understanding that marketers are either creative, or analytical beings. Very rarely are they both. In traditional forms of advertising, executing a campaign on a creative basis can be just as effective as an analytical execution. However, in the new emerging digital arenas of online marketing, a creative approach to campaign execution can negatively impact return on investment. This form of advertising is one of the most accountable and measurable forms of advertising. It offers virtually real-time campaign performance tracking, which gives professionals the ability to react quickly to a flattening audience. The accountability and measurability of the campaigns can also provide a solid framework for determining how much of the overall budget is dedicated to online efforts. Measurements can also be used to determine the proportion of dollars spent on the individual services, for maximum return on investment.

Have you ever been at a great party and unable to switch off from work? Did you find yourself comparing it to marketing a business (sad, I know) but true never the less.

Here are some observations on the similarities between throwing a party and promoting a business online.

Forrester’s recently published The Purchase Path of Online Buyers offers insights that aren’t surprising to many in the know. Email and search are the key drivers of online sales, with social contributing only a tiny bit.

You can of course buy  the paid report, but if you don’to, the bottom line is that smart retailers are using paid search and sophisticated email marketing to drive sales and repeat business. This article will give you the key findinds of the Forrester report.

Neil Patel, founder of KissMetrics was recently interviewed about SEO link building. Best practices, misconceptions, and future insights for 2013 and beyond were discused in this in interesting video.

Last month, this author wrote about "How to Tell if Your Agency Sucks at Digital" and tips for selecting an agency that actually knows digital and can demonstrate their knowledge about it. Here he focuses on digital strategy and ensuring that the marketing tactics to be deployed are the right ones and will work in a unified manner to drive optimal impact on business objectives.

While the concept of steering marketing communications towards a small number of influential networkers was suggested as far back as the 1950s, it has been in the age of Web 2.0 that it has truly taken flight. As social networks continued to grow rapidly, so has interest in influence. Global companies are realising the importance of targeting high profile bloggers, journalists and celebrities, and have increasingly sought to reach out to these influencers for endorsement and to drive word-of-mouth about the brand. But FMCG brands like Snickers can easily identify popular celebrity bloggers, businesses in other fields can have a harder task to find relevant influencers. To cater for this, a new wave of influencer scoring, based on social media analytics, has emerged, most notably Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.

This is the first post in a series that outlines the basic principles of online marketing and proceeds to deep-dive into each concept. The first concept that should be understood is that online marketing offers options and possibilities as broad extensive and varied as offline marketing.

Here's a challenge for all you marketers who are on top of your game: How do you make sure your marketing team is taken seriously within your own company? One important step you should take is publishing a thorough, thoughtful, quantitative monthly report on your marketing team's impact.

Here are 7 slides that make for an awesome monthly marketing report.