Digital Marketing Is Still Marketing

I’ve lost count of the people who earnestly suggest that Digital Marketing is the saviour of a company in trouble, or is a complete must for every company, or a company will go the way of the dinosaur without it..

Digital marketing is a set of tools that are available to any company. How to use them to best advantage comes down to deciding what strategy or strategies to use in  marketing the company.

After all if everybody in your market sector is on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter or any of the other social media sites how do you stand apart?  You’re part of the social media wallpaper. you can be easily browsed over before you even know you’ve had a visitor.

Instead your marketing strategy might call for tactics that don’t lead with digital marketing. Maybe your tactic is to run an advertising campaign in magazines you know your key customers (and their like) read. Or perhaps you could run a postcard campaign offering a nice freebie for calling you up, or visiting one of your digital marketing tools, such as your blog or maybe following you on Twitter.

Remember marketing is all about getting more leads, better qualified leads and more profitable leads into your sales funnel.

And yet when it comes down to it the digital tools we have available are simply a way of building a list of interested prospects and then funnelling them through to buy from you. 

And I think the problem we currently have is that digital marketing tools are springing up all around and there are very few true experts yet.

Twitter Marketing!

After all think of Twitter…

It’s only been going since the middle of August 2006. Not many people knew about it and it’s grown and grown to the current situation where there’s a lot of buzz about it.  And yet how many people could genuinely say they were experts in Twitter when new applications and clients are being developed for it all the time.

My own Twitter handbook is already outdated, although I do send email updates to the people who downloaded a copy.

And despite being on Twitter almost from the beginning I still discover interesting things about it all the time. And the challenge for many companies and "marketing gurus" is to make Twitter and other social media sites work for them.

Often the Internet is likened to the Wild West. I absolutely agree with that idea and just like the Wild West new boundaries are still to be discovered. So always treat any self-avowed expert with caution until you see whether they really understand the buzz words they use.

And when it comes to "digital marketing" that caution applies even more.