Digital Marketing Article
The marketing communications industry world-wide can almost never be accused of jumping the gun. Marketers tend to err on the side of caution, waiting for a more adventurous competitor to make a move, sticking with what they know. Except in the digital space, such caution could have potentially terminal results. It's a medium that's left brand, and agency playing catch up, even before a particular aspect of the business has been 'mastered', there's something new and complicated waiting in the wings. For instance, marketers were just getting the hang of display, when search engine optimisation (SEO) was the flavour du jour. SEO is still critical except marketers now need (or want) a social media strategy as well. Here are some lessons from the frontlines of digital marketing which will at least reduce the margin of spectacular failure and at best, deliver enviable results.
Thou shall not treat digital as an afterthought
Digital is often the runt of the litter when it comes to marketing spends. The specialist agencies are called in at the last minute when it dawns on a CMO that the 360-degree plan is perhaps not 360 degree enough. Agencies soldier on trying to retrofit ideas that were never elastic enough to go digital in the first place.
Gautamm Mehra, chief socio-search architect, Ignitee, says, "Both creative people and brand managers can think TV and print ads. Unfortunately, visualising social media and banners does not come as naturally. So we adapt TV commercials on YouTube and print ads on banners in a worst case scenario."
With digital accounting for just 2% of advertising spends according to Nielsen, we are still a good distance away from a large number of big budget campaigns tailored for the medium. A viral campaign all too often has a budget ` 3 lakh while a TVC's budget hovers around the ` 30 crore mark. The jury is out on whether this is changing and to what extent. Max Hegerman, president, Tribal DDB prefers to consider retro-fitting a challenge: "It's difficult if you think 'we have to transliterate what's offline into digital.' But we come up ideas that leverage the strategic direction, idea and objective."
The first time that Hegerman's agency hears of a new campaign for Idea is when the client passes on a brief; a different agency (Lowe) handles the creative for the brand. In case of the 'save paper' campaign, TV and digital had the same theme and energy but went in different directions. Tribal DDB came up with the idea of acquiring points online to grow a virtual tree.
The activity was spread over both a micro site and Facebook. Points were granted for tasks like sending SMS instead of a fax. Hegerman recalls, "At some point, you could plant a tree in your name. It allowed you to engage with the brand in a way that was meaningful. It captivated people and they were rewarded via give-aways; a blackberry in this case."
