Every online business craves an efficient digital marketing strategy. But despite an abundance of great books, blogs and other resources, only a few business owners devise a compelling, multi-channel strategy. There are many obvious – and not so obvious – reasons for that.
The success of a digital marketing strategy depends on how well marketing experts gather and analyze data, solve meaningful problems, and digitize brands. If these are done poorly, the resources a company expends on a campaign are immaterial – the results will be weak.
Why do companies make so many mistakes in trying to develop and utilize an impactful digital marketing strategy? The answer is: Companies rely on myths rather than verified data analysis tools and proven methodologies.
These myths are so widespread in digital marketing that even gurus and industry leaders repeat them again and again. As a result, sales suffer from poor marketing of products and services; ad dollars are wasted and relationships with vendors and customers sour.
In the following article, we will cover the five persistent myths of digital marketing. These fairy tales negatively affect companies which want to create and utilize their online presence strategy. We will correct the falsehoods you have heard and showcase how to shape a valuable digital marketing strategy.
Five Myths of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing myths are foes in disguise. They are so deeply ingrained in the way we plan and do our work that it is barely possible to recognize them in the first place. To be on the same page, let’s specify them:
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- Programmatic advertising works like magic
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- All you need to do is collect and analyze data – the rest will follow
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- Focus solely on
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- – websites don’t matter anymore
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- The Web is dead and Apps are the future
- Cookies play a major role in digital marketing
You know your enemies now. It’s time to safeguard your digital marketing strategy against the ignorant people promulgating them once and for all.
Myth No.1: Programmatic Advertising Works Like Magic
Programmatic advertising is on a roll. Really, why hire people and pay salaries if software can gather and analyze data, choose keywords, generate ad copy and show ads to a target audience? As every business is constantly looking for ways to reduce spending and raise revenue, programmatic advertising platforms seem to be an obvious choice.
Google AdWords helped cement the trend. It is relatively simple to manage keywords, generate ad selling copy and bid for your ads. The platform barely needs help to do the trick.
Programmatic platforms have revolutionized the market. As marketers, we need them badly because it is hard to imagine how platforms like Ad Exchange, RTB and DSP would work if they were not automated. The human resources required to collect, analyze and effectively utilize so much data manually are too high for most companies.
Digital marketing is certainly heading in the direction of programmatic advertising platforms. Nobody is going to challenge (or change) that.
Programmatic platforms lead to the extinction of ineffective demographic targeting, placing their focus on so-called intent-based targeting. This is good news, but programmatic platforms are hardly a silver bullet. You cannot just purchase software and expect to do nothing – that marketing dollars will magically lead to more revenue. Remember: no marketing platform can substitute for an actual human.
Why? Because ideal marketing conditions are met only when we have the Three R’s: the right message, the right person and the right time. By analyzing tons of data, programmatic platforms can find right prospects efficiently and show them ads when they will have the most impact. But these platforms are absolutely helpless in generating the cornerstone of digital marketing: the right message.
Only professional online marketers can generate the right message for any prospect. Machines can only gather and analyze data applying predefined algorithms. They cannot think dynamically like humans. Even the most advanced programmatic platforms make mistakes like displaying ads to casual visitors who are not interested in purchasing anything.
And it gets worse! Programmatic platforms are developed and used by so-called experts who do not have a clue on how to generate the right message. Although programmatic platforms are constantly updated, their value leaves much to be desired. The wrong messages are merely generated faster, that’s all.
What should we do, then: Just say ‘no’ to programmatic advertising? Of course not! But we need to think deeply about devising a concrete plan to integrate the right messages into programmatic advertising. Answering the following questions will help you do that:
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- Who will generate content for each step of the sales funnel? Will you hire a full-time copywriter or rely on outsourcing? (You need to have the right message for each step and for each group of your target audience. For large-scale projects, it is better to hire a full-time employee.)
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- Who will be responsible for developing a content strategy for your programmatic platform? Will it be your copywriter, a group of copywriters or your content editor?
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- How often will you change and re-market your selling copy?
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- Who will be responsible for the transition from demographic targeting to intent-based programmatic advertising? Who will handle the data?
- Who will be in charge of the “ideas – content – ads – target audience” routine? The entire digital marketing campaign’s success depends on it.
These are important questions to answer, so don’t rush. Do some hard thinking and sketch out ideas.
Overall, the success of programmatic advertising purely depends on delivering the right message, at the right time and the right target audience. If you ensure that your content is written with thought and care, you can safely rely on data the platforms gather.
Do you find all this hard to believe? Navigate to Yahoo and take a look at the ads. Yahoo uses one of the most powerful programmatic advertising platforms. Do these ads make sense to you at all, do you want to click on them? Probably not. You will find that most ads are irrelevant even on the “richest” platforms.
Let’s repeat again: the success of any advertising campaign (and, thus, digital marketing strategy) depends on the right message. That doesn’t mean you need to abstain from using technology. But do focus on thinking through your digital marketing strategy, figure out how it corresponds with your sales funnel, and how to generate a reasonable marketing message for each step.
Stay connected to learn more about other myths of digital marketing, coming soon!