The digital marketing bubble

In 2010 when my then-superviser told me about a new media that was going to rock our marketing worlds this scribe was not quite able to fathom it. Back then digital marketing was limited to having a Facebook Page and posting a few statuses at the right time (usually 9 PM). It was the good old simple time when organic reach (percentage of total fans reached without spending on media) was more than 30 per cent. Anything you posted on your profile or from your brand's page would be seen by your peers and discussed the next day. Presence on digital (or rather just Facebook because Digital was equal to Facebook back then) was more like good to have rather than a must. The landscape started to change in the next couple of years before rapidly expanding to the current scenario today. All businesses want to come online. A lot of them already have and now are trying to figure out the best possible way to execute it. We now have multiple full serviced digital agencies from one-man-shows to 50-employee ones. Most of them, if not all, claim to be great at digital marketing and offer a range of solutions like search, social, mobile, e-commerce etc. Some would take a different route and mention solutions like paid, earned and owned.
There is no doubt that a digital adaptation strategy is essential for today's businesses as more and more people get online. However, some businesses are guilty of being tunnel-visioned while handling this transformation. Adding digital departments/resources to our organisations and partnering with Digital Agencies is the order of the day. These newly-formed teams formulate strategies on their own. So a typical annual marketing plan will have two parts now: an overall marketing plan and a digital plan worked on by two teams: the old marketing team and the new digital team.
With relatively new concepts such as search, social, mobile, analytics and more to manage, it's no surprise that digital marketing can become somewhat overwhelming. Marketing has always had a big responsibility for most businesses, but the rapid changes enabled by the internet can mean that everything starts to pile up very quickly. The result is that small businesses feel that they can't compete, and large businesses quickly end up making mistakes due to a confused sprawling mess of accounts and responsibilities. Hence strategy and planning is so important to effective digital marketing. A small company with limited resource has a great opportunity to compete on a comparatively level-playing field compared to the costs of an expensive ATL advertising campaign, for example, but needs to be hyper-focused to use those resources most effectively. Meanwhile, a larger business needs just as much clarity in order to co-ordinate a larger range of initiatives and both need to plan for their efforts to constantly evolve throughout the space as platforms and priorities change.
This brings me to the title of this article "The Digital Marketing Bubble". The phrase "Digital Marketing" should be dumped according to Pepsico's Global Beverage Group President, Brad Jakeman. This scribe can't help but agree. "Marketing on Digital" explains the phenomenon that it is a little better. Are we over-glorifying one platform where there are other channels still at play and still relevant? Only 7.0 per cent of words of mouth are generated online whereas the remaining 93 per cent are still induced from real human interaction. Good old understanding of the target audience first and formulating a big idea based on business, marketing and communication objectives are still not out of fashion. Rather than setting up separate digital departments and hoping that these new young tech-savvy guys will take care of the PPCs, CPAs etc, the existing marketing teams should be trained to understand the opportunities that this now-not-so-new media provides.
It's a matter of three to four weeks of curiosity and studying to become Google certified and savvy with Facebook ads, for example. But it takes years to truly understand marketing in its full glory. Figure 1 is a highly simplified version of the typical funnel marketers use to formulate the marketing strategy. What is interesting to note is that the decision to be on "digital" (even though its influence is significant) comes in much later. So, it will be a good idea for the "digital marketers" of today to refresh their memory on marketing concepts and philosophies as a whole. On the other hand, there is no real excuse to shy away from learning about the opportunities presented by this ecosystem by the "traditional" marketers. Rather than creating departments, our organisations should pivot themselves into adapting to digitisation throughout the whole organisation.  
Technologies and tools will change but fundamental understanding of human behaviour and psychology will remain the same. Who knows in 2020 this scribe might not be writing another article on "The Wearables Bubble", because marketers will have been focusing too much on "Wearables Marketing" where our smart watches, glasses are bombarded with CPI (Cost per interaction) ads. As in the beginning of the article, this scribe would like to end with a quote from one of his former superviser, which somewhat goes like this - "Most likely if you are not over 55 years old yet, you will not be able to retire (properly) without learning digital".
The writer is a Digital Marketing Manager at Asia-Telenor Digital.
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