I’ll admit it… I’m in my 15th year of digital marketing, wrapped inside a 28 year career of marketing. While this can make me sound like an old fart, I realized quite a while ago that I no longer think in digital terms… I apply digital concepts, tactics and measurement to marketing strategy.
More than parsing words too closely, this goes to the core of all multichannel marketing and consumer centric strategies. Thinking in terms of channel based strategies, a.k.a. digital marketing strategies, is antithetical to success. Your target audience IS your target audience, regardless of where they come upon you.
Consider the rage of discussion around data management platforms, real time bidding and web recommendation tools. Across the board, all value the input of digital signals to try to deliver better or more efficient digital media. Is this the right answer? Last time I researched the area of media consumption, I found that consumers amass about 42% of their media impressions through digital channels.
If you still believe in the “digital marketing strategy”, today’s best practice, consider that you’re looking at less than half of your cutsomer engagement to deliver less than half of their impression of your brand. How does that align to the other 58% of media impressions? How do you control consistency between those impressions?
Hope you get the point. Start thinking about your marketing strategy, and how digital signals and media can help achieve your objectives. The world is turning increasingly digital, but until you make this shift, or until 100% of your audiences impressions are digital we’ll never see an alignment between the digital marketing strategy and overall marketing stratetgy… we’ll never see true consumer centric marketing or true customer engagement.
Visitor Centric Marketing 
Mark,
Very intersting post on digital marketing. Thanks for sharing your insights.
For those looking for best practices for digital shopper marketing, I recommend the following post:
http://shoppernewsblog.com/2012/05/31/best-practices-for-dsm/
Looking forward to reading more from you!
Best,
Johannes
Congratulations! Digital Strategy is now our concern to several customers and we believe on proximity with customer to understand the brand we take care and their customers. Language, days, hours, text, pics, videos, to increase the engage to contribute to sales. thanks for contribution and success
agree. digital isn’t a channel. it’s more like the air we breathe. rather than silo-ing into digital vs not, it’s more helpful to think of all marketing as interactive, because if it doesn’t engage people enough to get a reaction, then it probably isn’t doing anything…
Good post. Wish others would understand that “digital” is just one of many tools that can be used to achieve marketing objectives. And, depending on the objectives, audience, offer, etc. it may not always be the best tool.
Interesting!! A really nice take on this topic. Is it possible that the term “digital marketing” is possibly more popular at the moment? Or as I think you are suggesting totally misunderstood? I must admit I refer to myself as a digital marketer to capitalise on the keyword “digital” – yet from a purely professional perspective I agree with you about digital strategies being channel based strategies. In essence, I am probably more of a strategic marketer…who utilises different channels to reach my audience….. I won’t deliberate any further in detail here, but thank you for the insight. 🙂
P.S. Actually another term I keep coming across is “Integrated digital marketing” ..
Interesting!! A really nice take on this topic. Is it possible that the term “digital marketing” is possibly more popular at the moment? Or as I think you are suggesting totally misunderstood? I must admit I refer to myself as a digital marketer to capitalise on the keyword “digital” – yet from a purely professional perspective I agree with you about digital strategies being channel based strategies. In essence, I am probably more of a strategic marketer…who utilises different channels to reach my audience….. I won’t deliberate any further in detail here, but thank you for the insight. 🙂
P.S. Actually another term I keep coming across is “Integrated digital marketing”
[…] is a redux of a popular blog entry from July 2012: “Do you have a #digitalmarketing #strategy” or a marketing strategy for the digital world?” In that entry I tried to describe my professional movement over 15 years of digital […]