5 Tips for Evolving Your Digital Presence

The IAB recently distributed its 2008 online advertising spending report. The gist is that online spending will continue to grow but not at the steep rate that analysts initially projected. While other advertising channels are facing dire straits, online is still poised to gain sizable share of marketers’ overall budgets. The industry has come a long way from the eras when traditional marketing channels dictated how consumers interacted with advertisers. As the digital space evolves, the way marketers communicate with their consumers follows suit. With each new platform, marketers have another option to add to their mix, but marketers should not rush onto a new platform just to mark their territory.

Marketers need to balance the pros and cons of being a part of an emerging platform. The lure of being first is enticing because the companies that are first to make an impact in a digital realm are cemented as innovators. But you can’t wait too long as the risk of not adapting to changes fast enough can be substantial as there are several industries — like print media — that are unable to gain market share because they were absent for too long. Taking both extremes into account, marketers need to exercise their discretion to identify how, where, and when they fit into trends.

Let’s take a look at how to adapt with digital trends in a timely, brand-appropriate manner.

Think before you act
Digital marketers are always in a rush, and it’s always been this way. In the beginning, websites went live haphazardly — without much thought going into objectives, content plans or maintenance resources. Thankfully, the “build and they will come” mentality has faded, but marketers are still grappling with how to meaningfully engage with users on newer platforms. Marketers need to continue to identify points of synergies between their various advertising channels — whether it’s point-of-purchase or social media platforms. We need to continue the evolution away from the early days where campaigns were launched to keep pace with fads. These days when budgets need to be stretched, it is crucial to rely on strategy and plan executions around consumers — not just competitors.

Don’t forget: Consumers have control
Anonymous peer comments now carry the same weight as a recommendation from a trusted friend. BazaarVoice sites that 90 percent of consumers trust the reviews they read online prior to making a purchase. Digital marketing is a dialogue where anyone has an equal voice. This has created an environment where content is created in response to user behavior. Marketers need to take cues from their consumer base in all areas of digital marketing as a move in the right direction. Components like SEM strategies, conversion funnels and creative executions can and should reflect consumers’ affinities –not advertisers’ — to be effective. This is one of the hardest changes for marketers to absorb, but it is the most important. In the digital realm, marketers need to interact with – instead of bark at — their users. No matter how much sense it makes at the drawing board, keep messaging user-centric.

Make digital marketing work for you
For the most part, marketers are now in a state of flux where they are reevaluating and revamping their online properties. Emphasis is on creating holistic marketing plans where each advertising component augments one another to achieve goals efficiently. The goal is to create a plan where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To keep up with consumers, marketers need to scrutinize each available platform and try to prepare for the ones on the horizon. All decisions should be made with the premise of “Are my consumers here? Does this make sense for me?” If your consumers are not on MySpace, then don’t worry about this forum and allocate resources elsewhere.

Don’t miss the boat
The pressure for marketers to keep ahead of the evolving digital space is not going to let up because there are consequences for failing to adapt. Print journalism serves as a perfect example of this. The ironic part of their situation is that these publications are inherently well-equipped for success online. They provide consumers with unique content, have earned a reputation for being credible, and have a high level of brand recognition. The lack of website visitors is not because everyone suddenly forgot what the Chicago Sun-Times is. The issue was created because other online properties were quicker to disseminate and aggregate news. They established themselves as the online experts, and traditional publications never quite recovered. Does this mean that newspapers and magazines are doomed? Absolutely not. Traditional media outlets just need to refine their value propositions and offer users something that other outlets are not equipped to execute. The key will be to attract users from other sites to their own, and find novel means to syndicate their content. This can be accomplished by providing news feeds directly to influential bloggers (who can attribute and link back to the source), sponsoring user-generated news contests or offering more feature stories.

Learn from mistakes
Marketers can learn a great deal from the current state of affairs in the print world. The first is to listen to your consumers. Particularly when dealing with social media, it is crucial for marketers to observe their consumers in action before intruding on the conversation. The same goes for any digital marketing plan like website redesign, search engine marketing, or mobile marketing campaign. Marketers need to survey the landscape they are about to enter to ascertain how they can add value to it. Without this step, users will not take kindly to a marketer’s presence. Secondly, once it is determined that a move is warranted, marketers need to establish clear objectives for each component of their online marketing mix to ensure that the goals compliment corporate goals. A third step needs to be implementing tracking mechanisms wherever possible to base future planning on unbiased data. This ensures that campaigns are driven by consumers and not marketers’ intuitions.

Lastly, marketers need to make each execution count. Unlike other forms of marketing, the internet has a memory. If a company launches an ineffective offline campaign, it can fade with time, but online, content is cached, downloaded, shared, posted, and syndicated to the point where it is all but impossible to erase a poor advertising decision. This is why marketers need to take extra caution with their digital marketing plans.

Success in an ever-changing marketing arena boils down to being strategic, interactive and making each component work together. It’s important to note that a company cannot be everything to everyone, so decisions must be made to resonate with targeted consumers. Quality always trumps quantity in the long run.