Digital Marketing in Five Minutes: The Big Picture and What to Actually Do

With smartphones spreading over the past decade and remote working becoming commonplace, many owners and business leaders must be feeling the pressure to take on digital marketing, or to put far more weight behind it.

The term digital marketing covers such a wide field, however, that it is hard to get hold of, and we often hear people say they do not really understand what it means.

This article revisits the overall picture of digital marketing and goes on to explain the specific methods and what makes them work.

Summary
・Digital marketing is not limited to web activity; it means all marketing that uses digital technology.
・A major feature is that online customer behaviour data can be put to use.
・Customers make most of their buying decisions on the web, so creating points of contact online is essential
・The key to success is the process of understanding the market, understanding the customer, identifying your USP and then running the PDCA cycle
・Rather than pushing too hard for short-term results, trial and error and cross-team collaboration are what matter for continuous improvement

1. What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a concept that covers a very broad field.

Digital marketing means all marketing that is planned and carried out on the basis of digital information, such as user behaviour and statistics gathered online.

A very similar term is web marketing.
Web marketing is about delivering information to internet users through search engines, typically via Google Ads and SEO.

Digital marketing is often mistaken for web marketing,
but web marketing is one part of digital marketing, not the same thing.

Web marketing tends to get the attention because it is the best-known approach within digital marketing, but digital signage installed in physical spaces is also part of digital marketing. As the diagram shows, it is easiest to think of digital marketing as a concept that contains web marketing, digital signage advertising and more.

Now that the internet is woven into everyday life, purely offline advertising that involves no internet technology at all has all but disappeared from marketing, and marketing is becoming close to synonymous with digital marketing.
Another distinguishing feature of digital marketing, unlike traditional methods, is that you can deliver to segments matched to your target on the basis of the data you hold, and you can measure the effect of what you do.

Our guide, Digital marketing for winning new customers, download

Related article:
What is lead generation? The main methods, the points that make it work, and examples

2. Why you should take on digital marketing

Are customers deciding to buy before they ever meet a salesperson?

With smartphones everywhere and the effects of COVID-19, it has become difficult to live without digital at all, in private life and in business alike: searching for information, buying on e-commerce sites, browsing social media, getting maps and transport information, checking the weather, watching video, reading news sites and using all sorts of apps.

As the way googling has become an everyday word suggests, almost everyone now searches for information on a smartphone or PC and makes decisions that way as part of daily life.
In recent years a word for hashtag searching has also appeared, and gathering posts and word-of-mouth information by hashtag on social platforms such as Instagram has become commonplace.

As a result, according to the ceb mlc customer purchase research survey 2011, in B2B 57% of the purchase process is already complete by the end of information gathering. In other words, customers research products online, and by the time they meet a salesperson they have largely made up their minds.
That makes service online, meaning what information you deliver to customers, all the more important.

3. The overall picture of digital marketing

The overall picture of digital marketing

① Understanding the market
② Understanding the customer
③ Identifying your USP
④ Running the PDCA cycle

① Understanding the market
The first thing you need when drawing up a marketing strategy is a goal.
To set a goal you need to know the potential of the market itself. Skip that step and you end up with goals and plans that cannot be achieved. So that your plan is not just pie in the sky, start by checking feasibility: understand the size of the market and how much share you would need to win to hit your goal.
When you look at the market, assess not only the present but the future as well. Make sure you know where you sit in the product life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity or decline.

[Frameworks to use]
・PEST analysis
・Five forces analysis
・Product life cycle

② Understanding the customer
The precision of your marketing work depends on how precisely you understand the customer.
Do the customers who make up the market have a single need, or several? Establish the needs that make up the market and look into the criteria customers use to choose a product. The most effective method is the user interview.
Interviewing your own customers and users of competitors sharpens your picture of what customers actually want.

(Example questions)
What prompted them to hear about the product
How they choose a product (do they compare rival products carefully, or pick one without much thought?)
What mattered most to them when choosing
Why they chose that product
Whether they are satisfied with it…etc

The thing to watch in user interviews is not to swallow what customers say whole.
Customers cannot put everything about their own behaviour into words.
An interview is also not the same as everyday life.
Just as the everyday you is not quite the same as the you sitting an interview, take what people say on the assumption that they are, to some degree, on their best behaviour.

Find the customers you should really be targeting and set them down as the persona that underpins your marketing.
※ There may be more than one persona.

If you want to know more about personas, we explain it here,

A thorough guide to setting a persona, with examples and the items you need

[Frameworks to use]
・User interviews
・STP analysis

To find interviewees outside your own customer base, such as users of competitors, people use services like Twitter, Visasq and Timee.

③ Identifying your USP
Once you understand the shape of the market, understand the needs of the customers in it, have a sharper picture of who chooses you and who chooses someone else, and have settled on the persona you should really target, the strength you should actually lead with comes into view.
This is what is called the USP, or unique selling proposition.

If you want to know more about USPs, we explain it here.

[Frameworks to use]
USP
SWOT analysis

④ Running the PDCA cycle
Once the persona is set, plan your activity for each persona.
The principle of marketing is to put the product in front of the people who want it.
Think through how the person you have set as your persona gathers information, where they gather and who they are connected to; then, with that behaviour fully in mind, work out what methods and what message will present the product well, and plan from there.
This is the point at which digital marketing enters the picture as a method.
The important thing when planning is not to narrow yourself down to a single activity.

Even work built on careful research and solid reasoning gives no sure answer until it meets the market.
Drop the idea of expecting one attempt to succeed; what matters is the stance of running the PDCA cycle through trial and error until you find what works.

When you run that cycle, the stage to pay particular attention to is Check, the measurement.
Think in this order: ① grasp where you are, ② identify the issue, ③ hypothesise the cause, ④ plan the activity.

The great strength of digital marketing is measurement built on accumulated data.
After you act, you check what response you got.
On the web you can obtain all kinds of data: visitor attributes such as gender, age and location, along with traffic volume to the site, traffic sources, time on page, how people move through the pages, where they click and how far they scroll. You then use that data to test your hypotheses.
When you run this check, use the FICM cycle and think in the order fact, issue, cause, measure.

[Frameworks to use]
The FICM cycle
Fact
Issue
Cause
Measure

Three common failures in digital marketing
Here are the common failures when putting digital marketing into practice.

① Not securing enough budget or time
Marketing work cannot do without trial and error, and that takes money and time. If you try to get a result first time and demand returns over a short window, the investment runs out partway through the process. You need to build trial and error into the plan from the start. To plan for the long term, early market research must give you a clear view of the market’s potential and the return you can expect once you win share.

② The PDCA cycle does not turn
However good the marketing strategy and the planned activity, nothing changes unless they are carried out properly. As noted above, Check is what keeps the cycle turning.
If Check does not work, you get no feedback from the market after you act. What went well and what did not? Knowing that generates the next hypothesis and seeds the work that will be effective.

③ Poor collaboration with other departments
Digital marketing is not something the marketing department can complete on its own.
You may win leads that turn out not to be useful to sales. However many leads you secure, there is no result if sales cannot close them. And after a deal closes, repeat business only comes if customer satisfaction keeps rising.
In other words, acquisition, sales and the product all have to mesh for results to follow.
Marketing therefore needs close collaboration with the sales team who are in touch with customers every day, the customer success team working daily to raise satisfaction, and the product development
team who build the product. In the end it is people who buy and use what you sell. Working out strategy from data matters, but so does drawing information up from the front line and reflecting it in what you do; that is what leads digital marketing to success.

4. In closing

To get results from advertising management, you need to combine the specialist know-how an agency holds with the end-user data you hold yourself.

Bring it fully in-house and it becomes hard to stay in touch with the latest techniques or with what other companies are doing; your view narrows and specialist know-how runs short.
Leave it all to the agency, on the other hand, and understanding of your users stays shallow, the work becomes abstract, and fundamental improvement is hard to achieve.

Marketing is selling without meeting face to face.
What are prospects dissatisfied with?
What do prospects really want?
How do they get at information?

Build a set-up that properly reflects this first-hand data in how you run things and marketing starts to work of its own accord.

At NowVillage we support advertising management without creating an agency account, so you are ready to run it yourself if the need arises.
We would be glad to hear from companies planning to build an in-house advertising team over the long term, and from owners and marketing leads who are not satisfied with their current agency.

Our guide, Digital marketing for winning new customers, download