Everything you know about Digital Marketing is wrong
We are not even close to unlock the true potential of Digital
I got a present from my friend Timo Kiuru The Unthinkable Finn. It was the title of a book he thought I should write:
“Everything you know about story telling is wrong”
Well, thank you! That will not annoy anyone at all! After some initial hormonal spikes produced by my Swedish genes (or social upbringing depending on school of thought) I re-remembered that provocation isn’t necessarily bad, it can be a great way to make people stop and think, and to make them express their opinions. Which is exactly what I hope to achieve by my writing!
So I decided to up the ante and fry a bigger fish: Digital Marketing!
Bon appétit!
What is Digital?
Digital is one of those words that everyone has their own interpretation of. Some associate it with pre-rolls on YouTube, other with social media, yet others with some e-commerce application, nothing wrong with any of that.
I’d like to widen the definition a bit, or actually quite a lot. Digital is everything that isn’t physical. Your physical world right now might be the chair you are sitting in, the clothes you are wearing, the dog barking outside, the computer or mobile on which you are reading this article.
But the words you are reading are digital, the story I am telling is digital. If you are not just staring at the screen but actually paying attention to what you read, then you are having a digital experience right now.
We spend more than half our time awake in front of a screen, i.e. in the digital world, and the physical world continues to lose more and more of its audience. Maybe going Amish will be a thing in the future but it has still to enter Gartner’s Hype Cycle.
To conclude, almost everything is Digital, which means that almost all Marketing is Digital Marketing!
Blowing up Marketing #73
Apparently the definition of Marketing is equally hard to agree on. I just read 72 definitions of marketing, all different and not a single one a perfect fit.
So here is #73:
Marketing is the process of bringing a product or service to the market.
Bringing a product or service to the market is not something you do once and then you’re done, it is an ongoing process. The tools are the whole range of standard marketing activities, e.g. advertising, content / social / influencer / you-name-it marketing, marketing research etc.
This definition also allows me to squeeze in some non traditional parts of the process. We’ll come to that.
The current state of Digital Marketing
Digital has been all about content the last couple of years, and social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube has practically replaced the Web. I have covered this in an earlier article.
No need to repeat myself, just one paragraph that is relevant to my point here
Social gobbles content, it is insatiable. Put something in the social feed and see it disappear, just some hours from when you saw that amazing video it is gone, even if you do a search it is almost impossible to find, production value wasted and soon it is forgotten.
This is not only a waste of production value and money, it is a massive waste of marketing potential. Great content that could generate impressions and engagement for a long time just disappears, never to be found again. It is pure value just flushed down the drain.
Islands of value
All the content that is produced and put out there as a part of this process doesn’t necessarily disappear, it is just very hard to find.
With a metaphor from the physical world, it is like islands of value in an infinite sea. Or, to prepare for where I am going with this, think about the night sky, full of stars. Although we know that there are whole worlds out there to explore there is no way for us to know where they are or how to get there. Hyperdrive is still to be invented and explorers of the universe have to wait a while.
The true value of Digital
Luckily the digital world doesn’t have the challenges and limitations of the physical world. Hyperdrive (aka the hyperlink) was invented in the seventies and we can go anywhere with just a click. Space and time travel is already a reality!
This is the true value of digital. The ability to create connections that allows us to travel anywhere, anytime at speeds faster than light.
It has fundamentally changed marketing and sales in too many ways to mention. Still, this power is almost always used in a limited, unconscious, and inconsistent way, which means that it remains almost completely untapped.
Building a Brand Universe
This digital super power doesn’t make any difference if we don’t use it. To unlock the full potential of digital we need to start connecting the dots, we need to create a Universe for what we want to market — a product, service, brand or concept — where all its parts are connected through hyperdrive space flights.
Sounds futuristic? I explain how it is done in part 2 of this micro series which you can find here:
It turns out that the Universe is much more than just digital…
Before you go
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