Digital Marketing Power

When Google realized that Facebook wasn’t an aberration, anomaly or an afterthought it made its move. It created a social network that glued all its online assets together, collected social data and added social signals to its search algorithms. That glue cost them over half a billion dollars to design and develop. Google+ emerged from the Google lab womb with serious intentions.

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.

Social Media Marketing’s ROI (Return on Investment) has been discussed on the web in blogs and websites and comments are frequently heard such as “You can’t measure the ROI of social media marketing” One commentator from the Search Engine Land website says that even if you can’t measure the increase in sales or reductions in costs that are an essential element of measuring ROI there are other benefits for placing your content on the highly trafficked Social media sites such Links (sometimes 100′s and 1000′s of links), Long-term traffic from linking sites, Improved search ranking and Long-tail search traffic.

Because you develop these high-value links, you can easily rank prominently for targeted terms in search engines and increase your long-tail traffic which will stabilize at a much higher number than the pre-social marketing campaign numbers. The talented Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst, outlined a framework for measuring Social Media.  Here is his framework for measuring Social Media benefits

In the marketing world, getting in on the ground floor of the latest digital trend can pay huge dividends for users, particularly if they’re brands. But it’s difficult to know exactly which emerging site or app to dive into with both feet. Not every idea pans out, regardless of how much VC funding is acquired. True success depends on widespread adoption of the masses, or at least a dedicated community who simply can’t do without that service. So for marketers planning for 2012 (maybe a bit late), where should they start?

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.

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.