Don’t be a Digital Dog
Written by Ed Bradford on Wednesday 21st July 2010 at 4:02 pm
Digital marketing is a massively important area. All us enlightened modern marketers know that.
However, are many digital marketers wasting much of their time? Are they building relationships with the wrong customers? Are the messages wrong for that digital audience? Do the messages reinforce or counter the company’s competitiveness?
In essence, how much direction are digital marketers given by the company’s marketing strategy? Unfortunately, there is much evidence that strategy formulation is weak in many companies (see a book called ‘Marketing Plans, How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them’ by Professor Malcolm McDonald). The consequence of this is that poor targets are often set for digital campaigns and the digital marketer becomes an obedient dog keenly jumping over a cliff to chase a worthless stick for their master.
Understanding marketing strategy is essential. If you do not understand this topic, get it into your personal development plan for the next 12 months.
We ran a marketing competition recently (kindly sponsored by the CIM and the CAM Foundation) where we had five teams competing online to develop and execute their marketing strategy. One of the leaders of the winning team was Lindy Harper, an e-Commerce Marketing Manager from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She learned a lot about strategic marketing from the competition: “I feel I haven’t had much experience in real-life strategic marketing decisions so this was a wonderful way of testing myself. It’s easy to lack confidence in my decision making when it hasn’t been tested fully so playing the game was a safe way to test my judgement and winning has given me the confidence in my own decision making and strategic marketing skills that it could have taken years to build up in the real world.”
The lesson here is to understand that digital marketing should be tightly integrated with strategic marketing. Be hard on your superiors. Ask them these important questions to help you do your digital marketing successfully:
- How do we segment our market?
- Which are our most important segments for development over the next three years? (and why?)
- What are the unmet needs of customers in those segments?
- How are we planning to beat the competition in those segments?
- What are the key targets (sales, market share, profitability etc)?
- How can digital marketing do more to help you develop our strategy in the future?
The clearer they can be on this, the greater their chances of getting a high return on their digital investment, incorporating all the great insights that you can provide and you working smarter rather than plain harder.
For more information about the Market2win Game go to http://www.market2win.com/play.php
Tags: digital marketing, strategic marketing
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