The aim of the campaign was to use online ads to Reach the target demographic to highlight their offer compared to the competitors with the motto “After all, flamed grilled is always better”, digital interactions (Act) were encouraged through a feature in the Burger King app. They integrated a feature in their app that allowed users to scan any ad of the competition and burn it in the virtual world using Augmented Reality. Conversion to sale was encouraged (Convert) since users of the feature could get a free Whopper, encouraging trial and future purchases. Longer-term engagement (Engage) was encouraged by use of a mobile app, BK Express, specifically developed in Brazil enabling any customer to pre-order and avoid queues. The campaign aim was to achieve ½ million app downloads and online voucher redemptions.

You can read more about this campaign on The Drum.

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To understand how best to manage digital marketing in a business, it’s useful to scope out what digital marketing involves; which activities are required and how they relate to other marketing activities. I’ve found that without this shared understanding within a business, digital marketing won’t get the investment needed. This may seem like an academic exercise, but it’s needed since there is often still an educational job to do on colleagues in a business who ‘hold the purse strings’ of digital marketing.

To take some examples of misconceptions of digital marketing, here are some classics that I’ve heard and I guess you will have also:

• Digital marketing is our website
• Digital marketing is our Facebook page

As you can see, these narrow the scope of digital marketing drastically and it means that digital won’t get the budget to compete. For the seventh edition of Digital Marketing, Strategy, Implementation and Practice, I developed the 5Ds of digital marketing as a simple mnemonic to explain what needs to be managed. I included this in the first chapter to give a basic idea of what’s involved with marketing to make it accessible for students who will be familiar with their own experience of devices and platforms, but won’t be familiar with some of the key concepts for managing digital marketing such as the media, technology and data.

2020 update to article – the 7Ds of digital marketing

When working on the 8th edition I wanted to update the emphasise some concepts such as the applications of Artificial Intelligence for marketing and Big Data that reviewers recommended should be covered in more depth.  I also wanted to update the overall structure of the chapter which I was never quite happy with since it had evolved from one edition to the next. Since the original Ds were descriptive of how interactions take place it has a weakness that it doesn’t adequately address the ‘why’ and ‘who’ of digital marketing as covered in the chapter.

So I have introduced two additional Ds to give this all-important context and created this summary visual for the designer to improve upon. It adds complexity, but I think now better covers the main concepts covered in the introductory chapter that students need to be aware of when working on digital marketing, that are expanded on later in the book. Do let me know of any thoughts in the comments if you are an adopter or user of the book…

Thanks to the feedback from social media, LinkedIn, we now have updated version to introduce the new edition of the book:

The 7Ds of managing digital marketing are:

• Digital goals – reviewing what the business or brand is aiming to achieve through using digital marketing, considering how digital marketing can help the business compete better through considering new business and revenue models and investing more in digital transformation and always-on marketing in addition to campaign investments which will have SMART objectives.
• Digital audiences – understanding online audience characteristics, behaviours and preferences in order to deliver more relevant content and experiences to different target segments aimed at increasing interactions and so meeting business goals within the competitive online marketplace.
• Digital devices – our audiences interact with businesses using a combination of smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, TVs, gaming devices, smart assistants and other connected devices forming the Internet of Things (IoT).
• Digital platforms – most interactions on these devices are through a browser or apps from the major ‘platforms’ or online services, that’s Facebook (and Instagram), Google (and YouTube), Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.
• Digital media – different paid, owned and earned media communications channels for reaching and engaging audiences including advertising, email and messaging, search engines and social networks. Owned media also include the company websites and/or apps and content strategy.
• Digital data – the insight businesses collect about their audience profiles and their interactions with businesses which now needs to be protected by law in most countries
• Digital technology – the marketing technology or martech that businesses use to create interactive experiences from websites and mobile apps to in-store kiosks and email campaigns

Of these, it’s encouraging interactions on digital platforms using digital media which are most important to increase Reach. These often also involve integration with other digital channels.

For more background, see my Smart Insights post What is digital marketing? This gives an alternative visual summary as does this video explainer giving a simple explanation of digital marketing.

Our RACE planning system explains what digital marketing is in terms of activities to encourage marketing outcomes like leads and sales through the classic marketing funnel.

For Smart Insights members, our digital marketing management audits and plans give gives a more detailed breakdown of 25 key digital activities that need to be managed across RACE.

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For years, the ‘GoTo’ plan for a marketing plan or even a Go To Market plan, has been PR Smith’s SOSTAC® marketing plan model. It’s widely used to structure plans whether they are communications plans or digital plans. In our book Digital Marketing Excellence, and my other books, we’ve applied it to planning digital marketing plans.

One challenge I have seen when marketers and students are applying SOSTAC® in their assignments or plans, is that they struggle to integrate the different parts of the report which can become disjointed. To help with this, in my books and Smart Insights example templates and plans I developed a simple table which relates situation, objectives, strategies, tactics and measurements. This helps with integrating different sections and gives an efficient summary of your objectives and strategy to achieve them. Essentially it covers the SOST part of SOSTAC®.

This brings me to GOST, a simple framework that I learnt about recently when reviewing corporate marketing plans on a digital transformation consulting project. The GOST technique was used to enforce a standard method of relating objectives, strategies and tactics for plans in different business units.

I like the way that GOST defines a hierarchy for Goals > Objectives > Strategies > Tactics (similar to SOSTAC) which helps tackle the problem of creating a plan which naturally flows between the different sections. Each part of GOST has these aims:

Researching what else has been written about GOST yields relatively few articles and they seem to be mainly related to corporate planning, so it’s no perhaps not a surprise I haven’t encountered it before. This introduction to GOST has this useful table which explains how the elements of GOST relate. It also adds an overall mission that could be relevant at a corporate or digital transformation strategy level.

Considering how this could apply to our RACE marketing model, you can see that objectives, strategies, tactics and KPIs can be set for each part of RACE and summarised in a table like this.  You can also present each Objective > Strategy > Tactics on a single slide like this, which is efficient.

Our full RACE model breaks down into 25 activities, so another application I’m working on for another client project is to create a marketing playbook defining standard always-on and campaign activities to be implemented to improve the maturity of digital marketing across different teams. This defines standard techniques to be applied to improve one tactic such as content marketing or landing page effectiveness.

So, that’s a brief introduction to GOST. Do let me know your thoughts or tips based on how you use it.

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Digital media attribution is commonly used to assess which marketing channels are influencing leads and sales across multiple customer touchpoints. This is a powerful technique and tools like Multichannel funnels in Google Analytics can help you assess the effectiveness across different attribution models. However, attribution doesn’t definitively show you which techniques are contributing to uplift or decline in leads and sales when you start testing them.

Kenshoo defines an incrementality test as:

“An incrementality test compares the revenue or relevant KPI generated between a test group and a control group. By exposing the test group to an advertising tactic versus the unexposed control group, marketers can easily isolate the affected variables, clearly, assess immediate business impact, and formulate next steps with confidence supported by data”.

Geo-experiments are one testing technique that can be used to isolate separate audiences and show the impact of the advertising technique.

Incrementality testing can be used to test hypotheses such as:

• Are we limiting new customer sales by relatively too much spend on brand bidding or remarketing?
• Does Google’s Smart bidding / Target ROAS / Data-driven model may make perform better than previous targeting approaches

Google Ads Campaign Experiments are an example of incrementality testing specific to their platform. You can use these to test new audience targeting strategies or smart bidding against other alternatives.

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I’m often asked by Smart Insights members how best to integrate them. It’s a common question since it’s not immediately obvious which you start with.

What is the difference between the SOSTAC® and RACE models?

Let’s start with why you need to integrate them, which is based on the difference between them. It’s because each was created for a slightly different ‘use-case’ and has different strengths.

• PR Smith’s SOSTAC® framework is a strategy development process that can be applied to any type of plan. It was originally developed for creating marketing communications plans by Paul Smith in the mid-1990s before there was a need to create digital marketing plans, so it doesn’t reference specific digital marketing activities. Listen to Paul Smith explain SOSTAC®.
• The Smart Insights RACE planning model is aimed at creating digital or multichannel marketing plans for prioritizing and managing digital marketing activities. I created this around 2010 when we first launched the Smart Insights learning platform since I knew there wasn’t a comprehensive planning process for digital marketing. Each part of RACE planning is broken down into 5 activities which are essential for most organizations to manage, to give 25 activities in total.

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Digital marketing failures

Requests for more examples of failures of digital marketing are a common request within feedback when we review new editions of my books. Unfortunately, businesses don’t often share failures for obvious reasons. The books contain this evergreen example which shows what happens if you don’t get digital marketing right:

• Boo.com E-commerce failure

Content marketing

• Rachel Cooper, Global Content Strategy and Editorial, GSK. Presented at Digistrategy 2017. Explains limitations with existing strategy and measurement at GSK and then efforts to improve it.

Email marketing

• Manière De Voir – A fashion brand example of using AI. MDV boosts its newsletter revenue by 40% using AI-based predictive segmentation by Ometria. 2019. Artificial Intelligence for Marketing example.

Website – online value proposition

• Retail e-commerce online value proposition case study : SportShoes.com

Libraries of case studies

• Figaro digital case studies. This online publisher has regular examples of brands using digital marketing provided by agencies working for brands. Covers sectors from retail/e-commerce to travel, financial services and charities.

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Company background

The company was founded by professional footballer Bruce Bannister in 1982 – the first sports store of its kind providing purely technical sports gear for sports people. Today SportsShoes.com, has a product range of 12,000 products and millions of loyal customers.

They highlight their commitment to content investment and developing an OVP when they say:

“We are proud to share the most comprehensive, most detailed product knowledge in the industry with you – and from video guides to live expert advice, we’re here to help you to make the most informed choices possible”.

The OVP is also highlighted on the home page with the differentiating Why Shop With Us message:

Within their home page different forms of content supporting the OVP are shown in this panel:

Consider the types of content gaps that can you identify from this home page example compared to a retailer who just has product pages. These can include:

• Community – Running Hubs with blogs and discussion
• Tools – Product finder tools and running analysis tools
• Buyers’s guides – recommendations for buying a particular types of tool
• Run of site featuring of content – either in a header or in a footer on every page.

The OVP is also evident on individual product pages through more detailed content and product videos.

Segmenting OVP by audience

An on OVP should also consider content types by audience, so see how these are referenced. For Sportshoes.com the broad breakdown is Run: Gym : Hike for male and female, then with niches within these like fellrunning or marathon running.

International marketing

Explaining the proposition will differ depending on country. SportShoes.com has worked on translation to show value in local countries. This localisation case study shows how SportsShoes commissioned Web-Translations to create 12 localised microsites.

IP geolocation technology was used to direct visitors from various countries to the target microsites. Visitors with a Turkish IP address, for example, are directed to the Turkish microsite.

Leveraging web technologies to reach an international customer base, SportsShoes saw increased traffic from the targeted countries, with Spanish, Greek and French shoppers, with for example, 2000+ visits from Spain in the first week after launch and bounce rate halved.

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The first group use panels based on toolbar usage, so maybe less representative than other solutions with a wider sample. They provide comparisons of website traffic and traffic referral sources.  These give free insights or sample data in reports, so are most useful for students comparing websites in assignments.

• SimilarWeb – Provides comparisons of website traffic and traffic referral sources
• Alexa – Owned by Amazon, now mainly a paid service focusing on keyword analysis, but its free SiteInfo website benchmarking tool gives a top-level comparison of site traffic
• Jumpshot – Different to other panels, focusing on customer journey analytics, particularly for E-commerce brands and retailers

Panels focusing on ad effectiveness

Typically used by large retailers, their sites don’t typically don’t share insights

• comScore – some insights provided in reports in the press release section
• Nielsen – Nielsen global media
• Pathmatics –  uses a panel and crawlers to show ads
• DRG Ad benchmarking – Use a panel to assess ad effectiveness
• Kantar Marketplace from TNS Global – a panel of 88 million globally used to test ad effectiveness

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• Asana.com – best for more complex projects with task hierarchy
• Basecamp.com – best for reviewing project creative and simple team task management
• Clickup.com – best for usability, with tailorable templates. Powerful free version
• Monday.com – good for usability and simple task management
• Trello.com – best for editorial calendars, Discovery for consulting and agency client projects. Powerful free version for individuals, small team

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But what is the reality? Mark Schaefer famously coined the term ‘Content Shock‘, which is still with us today. Much content marketing activity generates little engagement or sharing, but to mean, that just means we need to work harder, based on a solid strategy. As Mark explains:

“Recognizing the continuous dynamics of Content Shock is the most important part of content marketing strategy today. Without incorporating the reality of Content Shock into your plans, you’re wasting your time and money. This means:

Accurately assessing where your business and industry stand in terms of information density

Creating a content strategy based on your ability to maneuver within the content density reality of your niche

Continually assessing your progress and monitoring the density of your niche

Committing to a long-term content strategy of relevance, consistency, and superiority to stay at the top”

I always keep an eye out for the latest research from the Content Marketing Institute to see how businesses are managing content marketing to deal with content shock. Their latest Content Marketing 2020 Research is useful in that it highlights these three techniques used by  businesses that rate themselves as most effective in gaining results from content marketing:

• 1. A documented content marketing strategy
• 2. A centralized content marketing group (or person) working throughout the organization to co-ordinate content marketing
• 3. Agreed metrics to measure content performance

Countering content shock through creativity and content quality

I’m sure few would disagree that these success factors are important, particularly in a larger organisation, since the use of an overly prescriptive, centralised approach can limit content marketing. Simply put, it can stifle creativity and this stifles cut-through across social media and organic search. This potential problem has recently been eloquently highlighted by Doug Kessler recently:

Something happened to content marketing.

As marketers industrialised and professionalized it… we lost something.

[New post: 2 minutes]https://t.co/yLwSGisTOz pic.twitter.com/a1EXgpUxx1

— Doug Kessler (@dougkessler) November 4, 2019

He says:

We turned something exciting…

something anarchic…

something experimental…

…into something dreary.

Something expected.

Something easy to approve…

I completely agree. But at the same time, creating a content marketing strategy is an essential part of getting the buy-in and resourcing you need to enable creativity and to compete with other businesses who have more buy-in and resources. What I often see in businesses is that without a strategy and sufficient resourcing, the creativity isn’t there leading to a ‘me-too’ approach to content marketing which brings to mind Doug’s classic article from way back in 2013.

10 practical techniques to improve content quality and deliver results

As an antidote to this, I’ve been reviewing the content marketing techniques that I think are useful to apply, almost regardless of which sector you work in. Yes, it is a list and we’re supposed to avoid a checkbox mentality, but we still need to deploy proven techniques that the content marketing leaders use. So consider these…

1. A content marketing strategy based defining your goals containing…
2. Content marketing metrics and KPIs to check you are getting the returns you need.
3. In-depth customer persona s using content mapping to align with customer needs through a purchase journey
4. Rigorous content ideation and a content marketing editorial calendar to cover the interests of your audience, but with the flexibility to cover the latest zeitgeist
5. Sufficient investment in both paid and earned content distribution including content repurposing and
6. A quality content hub sharing content that will get cut-through in organic social and organic search, using practical, creative fuelled techniques such as…
7. Cornerstone content forming Evergreen content
8. Content curation
9. Skyscraper content, and even better…
10. 10X content !

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