Strategic Digital Marketing & The Benefits For Companies

Why do companies invest so much time and money into social media at present?

As mentioned in my previous post companies are using consumer information and data from digital platforms, such as social media, to develop marketing strategies and thus grow their business and customer base.

Not only is there lower costs associated with advertising on social media to product your product and attract customers, but there are also the ‘back of house’ performance measures that companies track and monitor.

Have you ever wondered how many people have seen your ad? Or how many people actually clicked onto your website form a Facebook or Instagram post?

Well, companies are now investing big money into web analytics and social engagement metrics. Through this they can create new business models that add value, build customer relationships and increase profit (APM Study Guide, 2014).

To establish a brief and simple understanding on the methods of performance measuring, I will explain the concepts of digital attribution and tracking to give us a start.

Previously companies used spreadsheets, VLOOKUPs and pivot tables to understand the length and depth of attribution their digital marketing campaigns had for the company. As more social media channels have developed and the path to purchase is more complex companies needed better ways to obtain performance measures. This would allow companies to see what content would drive clicks and fuel conversation via other channels such as paid search (Nissim, 2013).

Greg Nissim explains that the concept of attribution helps to understand the effect different advertising channels have on each other. The benefit of this technology is to strategically invest your money in advertising channels which will work best for your marketing campaign and help establish the path to purchase across channels and devices rather than just within one channel (Nissim, 2013).

As you may have noticed, over the past couple of years there have been many more companies established that specialise in web analytics. They help clients understand, as mentioned above, where their advertising dollar would be better spent and pinpoint the best channels to do so. Not only does ‘Digital Attribution’ help clients but also ‘Tracking’ is another important performance measuring tool for your digital advertising spend.  

Tracking is seen through the use of ‘Cookies’, which help advertisers reach and track customers through digital channels. In 2014, browsers such as Apple’s Safari, Google and Microsoft are possibly talking about dropping all cookies.  A cookie-less environment can be taken negatively by advertisers, however, Greg Nissim believes it will provide advertisers with more information than they had before, and it is privacy advocates who should be fearful.

The new systems being implemented, such as new tracking techniques (like tracking people who are logged in – Google - or using related devices or platforms - Microsoft) can be more difficult to detect or disable (Nissim, 2013). The biggest win for marketers is being able to track customers across devices. A new technique, which is in the pipeline, is digital fingerprinting. This shows the unique information which each consumer carriers when on the Internet.

Mobile devices and phones are an essential component of the research in many consumer purchases but there is still a lot of work to be done in proving that the purchase chain between mobile research and desktop purchase is broken. At the moment mobile received a lower percentage of overall marketing investment then desktop devices based on the above information not yet being proven by marketers (Nissim, 2013).  

For many companies competing in the digital marketing environment, there are competitive advantages such as ‘attribution and tracking’ which can help companies better develop their digital marketing campaigns. However, marketers for companies also have to be prepared for any changes, such as the removal of cookies tracking, to adopt the changes quickly and stay competitive in the world of marketing.