Digital Marketing - June 12, 2021

How to Do Digital Marketing Properly

Dr. Augustine Fou June 12, 2021

0 2,785 5 min read

I have written extensively about the fraud and waste in digital marketing today [1], [2]. This article is not about that. Marketers who have already begun to clean up their own digital campaigns are also starting to ask how to invest their ad budgets better (because of all the savings they are getting by sending less of their budgets to bad guys). In addition to just avoiding the bad, they want to maximize the good — i.e. their business outcomes. What follows is a simple three-part hierarchy to use to think about advertising investments. Again you don’t have to take my word for it; and please give me feedback if you disagree with any or all of it or let me know that it worked for you.

If I had $1 to invest in digital

I would invest it in creating content, as opposed to spending it on ads. This is for the simple reason that the ad is over the moment after it is aired or displayed. Some will argue that there is a “branding effect” but that assumes that human users saw the ad and remembered it. This is just like paying for a full page ad in a magazine but the user flipped past that page and didn’t really notice your ad. Most humans ignore the ads on webpages too (“banner blindness”); a large portion of ads are shown to bots on websites selling inventory through programmatic channels; some ads are never displayed on screen because the real-time bidding and ad serving process took too long; and even if the human did see it, they may not remember the ad or the message in the ad. So the ad is over the moment it is aired.

Creating content, however, will yield longer lasting value. If you’re doing marketing, and your content helps answer questions that your potential customers have during their customer journeys, that helps them get to the next step of their purchase decision process. It’s extremely difficult to know every user’s customer journey, and every user’s customer journey is as unique as their fingerprint. But many customers may have the same question when deciding whether to buy your product or service. Think of content creation as an extended FAQ — create short and useful answers to frequently asked questions; that helps more potential customers along their journeys. Make that content easily findable and accessible — i.e. search engine optimization — and put the content in places where your potential customers are likely to look. The marketer that is the most helpful in prospective customers’ journeys is usually the one that “wins” the sale. And that content gets more and more valuable over time, and continues to pay dividends in the future, every time it helps a user get closer to the purchase of your product or service.