Today All Successful Marketing is Digital - There are no Alternatives

Today’s digital eco system is has baked in high risk and rewards.

Getting mental shelf space with today’s always on smartphone consumer is challenging; but, the rewards can be spectacular.

Understand Your Business is Under Attack from an Unrelenting Digital Landscape

Data is Exploding at an unprecedented rate: projected to grow 10X the next six years, with 44 trillion gigabytes shared by 2020 - it’s a noisy world.
Savvy bigger brands are leveraging “social influence” to reach high value customers or influencers; making it more difficult for smaller brands to get heard.
Businesses are aggressively deploying a product marketing strategy encompassing a no frills brands along side their traditional branded products: getting real world and “mental” shelf space is challenging.
Native advertising is blurring the lines of how consumers and professionals identify and engage with content.
All brands by necessity of these fundamental changes in the digital landscape are forced to become publishers on some scale.
Technological expertise is overwhelming the core competency of management teams, making it harder to find and afford the right people.

Marketing is being Redefined in Real Time – Speed Kills or Builds Your Brand

It’s a speedy iterative global market, with no formal boundaries for trade or commerce. Savvy brands recognize and leverage this paradigm shift. Building a “beachheads go to market strategy” based on rapid customer identification, coupled with analytical “listening” and adjustment of tactics.

The “Google Effect” determines how “prosumers” find you via smartphone or the web.
Nothing is new forever: product life cycles are shorter and more compressed.
We are seeing a shift to self-educated buyers; this goes B2B or B2C brands.
Content is everywhere and anything: your brand voice gets heard via content creation and syndication.
It’s a 6-8 second click of death competitive world. Image trumps content early in the sell cycle. Stand out with impactful images that resonate with your market.
Technology is embedded in every marketing activity. Tech savvy brands are winning in the marketplace.

Ten Critical Digital Marketing Differentiators & Success Builders

Images are the door openers to your content – don’t be boring with these: take risks and understand images are the first step in content marketing.

Your web site is the ground is ground zero marketing initiative: it should be an organic marketing asset: changing frequently, incorporates a blog with smart content, with A/B testing for lead generation analysis.

Getting discovered in this new digital age is core anchor for your marketing processes: “live” and “be” where your customers are with a targeted social strategy, smart content marketing efforts, paid media, newsletter marketing, lead gen on any/all targeted social platforms.

Recognize your customer is untethered from your brand; one in five shoppers never left their desks and/or couches in the most recent holiday shopping season. Your goods and service may be somewhat anonymous to them or the purchases decision was made even prior to visiting your web site.

Understand who your customer really is in start-up language that’s known as a profile or brand persona. In the ancient days it was referred to as a customer demographic. This is one of the most critical exercises your business can undertake.

Build in relevance to each customer persona profile you are targeting by creating smart content syndicated via his or her channel of choice: web, social, mobile, newsletter, blog, etc.

Niche in when/where you can to make your brand or business stand out – this may sound trite; it’s not, gives your brand focus, makes your marketing more efficient & drives competitive advantage.

Be a confident brand but not arrogant. We all want answers from smart people.

Push boundaries when/where you can. We can’t tell you what these are: ask your customers and test and retest marketing initiatives.

Recognize we are moving into an autonomous and automatic buying cycle for most prosumers: that’s not all bad; it levels the playing field for many smaller brands.

You can move faster than many bigger competitors, which is a distinct advantage in a market that has commerce market moving faster than any on record.

Eight Cool Apps for Digital Savvy Brands

Trellos is a cloud based collaboration service (free and paid versions) that will save you time on any web site design project.
If you are a consumer brand and using Facebook or Instagram WishPond is a must use app for social promotions. Great company to work with too.
If your using Gmail to run your business email correspondence then Rapportive is a must use application for any busy biz exec. Giving you rich contact information right inside of Gmail.
BuzzSumo shows you the most shared links and key influencers for any topic or website. Ideal for content strategy, outreach and competitive research. It’s a great free tool for analyzing content engagement.
SpyFu gives you actionable information and intelligence about where and how competitors are advertising: media spend, keywords, ad samples and custom reports. Must have tool for any brand using PPC.
Social Oomph is an all in one general purpose yet powerful tool that automates a great deal of the tactical social media marketing processes.
Any brand that’s serious about growing your Twitter should be using ManageFlitter. It’s low cost ($50. a month approx), powerful and will help you grow your account. The UI is a bit geeky, with an associated learning curve but well worth the 3-5 hours for baseline proficiency.
Great headlines drive content conversions. The Advanced Marketing Institute’s headline checker is a cool tool for any content marketer that wants to become the next David Ogilvy.

Quick Digital Dive Summary

If your business is going to be a success in today’s social driven world you must have a fundamental grasp of every aspect of digital marketing: web, design, social, analytics/ROI analytics, lead capture systems, mobile and more.

Your business is building a marketing stack that blends marketing activities and platforms with technology.

I blanch a bit using this rather trendy marketing term and I think we marketers make it overly complex.

You are layering web site design and/or social profiles with other marketing processes and “stacking” them in a virtual sense.

But, as always, iteration is critical to success with all aspects of digital marketing.

Start small and simple and build out from there.