An Approach to Digital Marketing

Snehil Gautam
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read
An Approach to Digital Marketing

I have met many people who find themselves lost when the topic of the discussion is around digital marketing. I don’t blame them as digital marketing itself is a rapidly evolving subject. It has changed the approach of many organizations recently and rest will follow suit in coming years.

Here, I am writing this to encourage all to embrace digital marketing and give a peek into my understanding of the subject. Knowingly, I have tried not to get into too much technicality with this post.

Digital Marketing Pillars

As per my understanding, most of the long-term marketing strategies are based on 4 pillars of strength. Even though, in my current position, we deal with a relatively niche sector of real estate, I think these 4 pillars are core for DM strategies across most of the sectors, if not all.

Technology: It is important to have a small technology team dedicated to serve the marketing needs. We, at Housing.com have a MarTech team under marketing, which has helped in creating in-house customized panels, optimization tools and proprietary ad-tech platform. DM can become overwhelming in case you are dealing with multiple strategies, products, services, locations, languages etc. Instead of increasing the headcount in the team, technology could be a potential solution for overcoming these complexities.

‘Time to react’ plays a critical role in DM. Real time changes can save substantial amount of money for the organization. Therefore, more automated rule based real time channel strategies lead to better optimization and higher savings.

Data: If you want to be successful in DM, you need to be good at data. (If you are not, hire someone who is). Given its dynamic nature, DM requires regular data monitoring. There are many external and internal factors which influence the outcome — competition bidding, product changes, change in user behavior etc. Only continuous data monitoring can save you in this ever-changing environment.

During the initial phases of a marketing channel, the team needs to get their hands dirty to understand the user behavior by granularly monitoring the user activity on the product. Data needs to identify the right user segment, right content, right time and right frequency to target. Till the time you don’t have this level of precision, please keep experimenting and digging.

During the sustenance phase, be creative in making your own metric, which makes sense to the business and needs to be tracked on a regular basis. If the metric starts to move away from the comfortable range, it is time to re-look at the strategies.

Creativity: In our parlance, creativity encompasses different ways to communicate with the user. DM demands multi-channel, multi-device and multi-format communications. You need to keep building better and interesting ways of conversing in the digital space. Communication also needs to be customized as per the phase of the user journey. Creative fatigue i.e. using the same creative for a longer period leads to lower returns, is a widely accepted norm in DM. Hence, drop in CTR is an indicator to amend the changes in the creative. Constant experiments are required to reach to the right creative for each communication strategy.

Explore: You will never reach the right mix of channel strategies without failing with few of them. I have seen people rejecting DM due to early failures. Patience and persistence will eventually pay out. Experiment is the key. Experiments with creative, copy, targeting, landing pages, frequency etc will finally lead to a more robust growth and will help you to be ready for any business objective.

What Does Future Hold For Digital Marketing?

With the consumers moving so rapidly towards Internet for any transaction, it’s just a matter of time, eventually all naysayers will accept DM as their core strategy. Today digital marketing spend contributes to 15–20% of overall ad spends in India. With increasing internet penetration and smartphone growth, the digital spends will increase significantly in coming years and there will be huge gap in terms of skills and resources. First movers — both companies and individuals, will certainly have a major advantage.

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