How to Do Digital Marketing Properly

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.?

If I had to do advertising

You might be wondering, what if my content has not “ranked” in organic search yet, so potential customers cannot find it? That’s when you can and should pay for some advertising. But, it should be paid search, not “spray and pray” display ads. This is because paid search is 100X more efficient in economic terms -- specifically, you don’t pay until you get the click. By comparison, you are paying on a CPM basis for display ads (every thousand impressions). If you’re only getting a 1% click through rate, wouldn’t it be many times more economical to pay only when you get the click? Less astute marketers will argue, here, that they are effectively paying for clicks, with an eCPC (“effective cost per click”) metric in programmatic. But they failed to realize that most of those clicks are from bots, making their campaigns appear to be performant, but with no real business outcomes.?

Search ads are not only cost efficient because you pay when you get the click, it is also far better than any targeting offered by ad tech vendors. This is because the search ad is shown when the user is looking for something, and the user even tells you what they are looking for -- i.e. the search keywords they typed in. That is the ideal time to get your ad in front of them. By truly understanding what they are looking for, you can direct them to the most useful piece of content you wrote previously. If that content helps answer the question they had at that stage of their journey, they can move on to the next step. This is like completing a “missing link” in a broken chain. If any link is missing or broken, the user cannot get to the next step. If you help them answer their missing links, you help them get more expeditiously towards the purchase.?

See: Missing Link Marketing

If I had too much money

The third part? There is no third part. That’s because if you did the previous two parts well, you will rarely find yourself in a situation needing to yell at prospective customers through a bullhorn about how great your product or service is -- i.e. do advertising like display ads, video ads, etc. Furthermore, modern consumers are too savvy for that. They are not going to just take your word for it, after seeing a banner ad, and go buy your product or service. They’d sooner ask a friend or go online to do some independent research themselves. They know ads are lying (or exaggerating) to try to sell them something, so they discount the message in their own minds.?

The biggest brands with the biggest budgets are wasting the most money. That’s because most of the sales would have happened anyway, without the $2 billion of spending in digital by P&G. The irony is that the more well known the brand, the less you have to spend on advertising. People already know your brand and products and are already in the habit of buying your soup, soda, or soap. If you’re thinking that DTC (direct to consumer) brands need advertising, they do. But many of the best DTC brands came out of nowhere and dominated even incumbents, because they had a better mousetrap. Early adopters of the DTC brand then spread the word to others -- genuine influence, not fake or paid-for influence. The biggest advertisers boasting of how much they spend in digital are the ones wasting the most money simply because they have too much money, and they need to spend it.?

So What?

For most marketers who want to do proper digital marketing, focus on parts 1 and 2 -- content that helps answer “missing links” for prospective customers thinking about buying your product or service and paid search to bring those users to your content when the content has not yet ranked in organic search. If you still have money left over, run experiments to see where you can improve; or continue to invest in innovating your product, given the actual usage and feedback of existing customers. If your product or service is materially better than the next nearest competitor, it practically “sells itself” and your customers will also sell it for you. You don’t need to pay for display, video, CTV, and other ads in digital. That’s how you do digital marketing properly.?

Quick Tips for Those Buying Digital Media

• search ads - limit them to the main property of Google.com (or Bing) by turning OFF search partners, GDN - Google Display Network
• display ads - limit them to the main properties of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the apps by turning OFF Facebook Audience Network (FAN)
• YouTube ads - use a strict whitelist where possible; if you have to buy across everything, be sure to turn OFF "embedded videos" and "livestream" to reduce fraud and brand safety issues

A big shout out to Camelot Strategic Marketing in Dallas, TX for their awesome work over the years.