Robbing from the Lazy, Giving to the Rich

Digital marketing platforms and tactics will steal you blind and perform poorly if you aren’t diligent

It seems like only yesterday when all a digital campaign needed to work was a good creative message and a cheap CPM. Now, with the explosion of generative artificial intelligence tools, success is even simpler. Right? Unfortunately, no.

Elements in the ever-changing digital marketing landscape are violently colliding. As AI grants digital marketers many efficiencies, privacy legislation and cookie deprecation offers necessary guardrails pushing marketers to more premium tactics. And the key check on it all is the unquenchable thirst for practical business outcomes and analytics.

The numbers come in many forms: KPIs, events, key events, conversions, sales, engagement. The numbers are also plentiful, which means the numbers have to measure the right elements or tell the business story or damage can be done.

CRIME IN PROGRESS

For example: A brand could spend six figures in paid social media driving traffic to a new initiative and see incredible metrics. They could see substantial reach into the target audience, a click-through rate of 2 percent or strong channel engagements like comments, likes, shares, etc. Facebook’s ad tool will bend over backwards to pump up these metrics on a client’s behalf, and it would be tempting to keep pouring the money down the Facebook drain because it is obviously doing the job.

But if the traffic the campaign is sending has an average session engagement time of 3 seconds and a GA4 engagement percentage of 25 percent, Facebook downward optimized someone’s bank account for nothing.

Another example: A hybrid seed brand could set up a paid search program with Google and conservatively put a budget of $5,000 per month against it to test the waters. After a few days, that brand may see that $5,000 isn’t enough and that the volume could handle $15,000 or even $25,000. What a great surprise, right? No.

Terms like corn or farm seem like great initial terms for such a program but smart marketers filter out “corn recipes” and “farming simulator video game” to make the marketing work to bring the right audience through the campaign.

So, gone are the days of set-it-and-forget-it digital marketing, if that was ever actually ok. Instead, digital marketing in 2024 is about establishing a smart process and staying alert throughout.

A BETTER PROCESS

Here are some of the elements to the process:

• Research
  Ask what the marketing dollars are designed to accomplish, study the potential audiences for marketing susceptibility and then align proven tactics to accomplish the goals.

• Push the envelope of your options
  Make the platforms and partners work harder on your behalf to find the audience and deploy the right tactics.

• Launch with the end goal in mind for the user actions
  Set up appropriate landing pages and program key events or conversions so you can see quickly how everything is performing.

• Monitor
  Don’t sleep on any of it. Watch the tactics and audience engage with your campaign out of the gates and then see the optimizations work (or not).

• Actually optimize
  Most digital marketers talk about optimizing. Fewer actually do it. The auto-optimizing platforms lull us to sleep but stay aggressive.

• Learn from successes and failures
  Your audience tells you quite a bit through each campaign. Are you learning from it? Which tactics do they prefer? Which media entities reach that audience the best? Is it changing?

Digital has changed significantly in 2024. There is no easy button. Heck, that Staples ad campaign is from 2005. Don’t let your digital look like it’s also from 2005.