Digital marketing drives value – for those who keep pace

Faster communication, lower costs, higher conversion – is there anything digital marketing can’t do?

Its ability to drive value from every step of the marketing process is unprecedented, but maximising this value is a demanding exercise.

We asked two specialists in this area to tell us some of digital marketing’s biggest benefits to business – and some of the disruptions they see on the horizon.

Linda McDonald, Senior Director Marketing, Sales & CX at global print, design and digital group Vista across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, sees three main benefits to a strong digital marketing program.

Benefits abound

“The first is a brand’s ability to target their audience with granular accuracy,” Linda says.

“The second is cost efficiency and reduced wastage of marketing funds through effective digital marketing activity. Marketing funds are often in question – the first thing to be cut when an organisation looks at managing the bottom line,” she says.

The third is measurement. Digital lends itself to precise measurement, removing questions that often accompany traditional marketing activity around return on investment which is often difficult to measure.

“With things like TV advertising and other brand-building activity, it’s always been really hard to measure the impact of that investment on the bottom line,” Linda says.

“With the ability to directly measure the KPIs across the digital marketing activity that you’re running – that could be eyeballs, it could be engagement, it could be conversion, it could be other metrics – now we can showcase the direct impact from that component of the investment that we’re making.

“That actually helps demonstrate the value marketers can add to a brand and a business. It demonstrates that we’re not the fluffy side of the business. We actually are able to – and focused on – driving the end business result,” she says.

Kia Petrenko, Head of Growth Marketing at Menulog, says agility is another benefit.

“We measure the effectiveness of all our marketing strategies, but it’s a lot easier to attribute orders and revenue to digital campaigns vs ATL (above the line),” Kia says.

“It’s also a lot easier to make quick decisions and adjustments to strategies based on performance,” she says, adding Menulog’s digital is programmatic.

Programmatic marketing uses technology to buy and sell online advertising, and often works with third-party cookies, which collect data on users and sell ad space to individuals based on browser use.

Growing challenges

In terms of challenges on the horizon, Kia says the ability to target audiences and measure results through digital marketing is a big one. Google plans to deprecate, or stop supporting, the use of third-party cookies to collect data on users and sell ad space based on that data.

“This will result in less relevant or targeted ads to users and, in turn, less effective advertising,” she says.

“With the deprecation of third-party cookies, I have seen more and more businesses start to leverage their first-party data to show relevant ads to specific audiences.

“Menulog has been operating for over 16 years, so you can imagine the depth and breadth of data and insight we have on our customer set,” Kia says.

She says Menulog uses a media agencies UM and Kinesso and data-enablement platform LiveRamp, as well as data partnerships, to optimise the online food-delivery service’s first-party data.

“We have been able to effectively leverage our first-party data to target a much more qualified audience through our programmatic media buys, with initial tests showing strong results,” Kia says.

The iOS14.5 update is another challenge to the accuracy with which digital marketers can target audiences and measure results because it gives iPhone users the option of preventing apps from tracking their activity.

“In terms of iOS14.5, we are lucky enough to have a data science team, in conjunction with data partnerships, to help model our missing (user) conversions,” Kia says.

“Smaller businesses don’t have this luxury, so I will be very interested to see how measurement solutions evolve over the next 12 to 18 months,” she says.

A busy, demanding space

The relentless pace of change is putting greater demands on digital marketers. Linda says testing and learning at speed – and accepting the pitfalls – are key, and she offers some suggestions:

• Have the right partners and team members to keep you moving with the pace of the market because that’s the pace at which customers are moving.

• Allow your team to take time to understand what’s happening in the market; encourage them to do that. This is a very busy, very demanding space.

• You need to be OK with the fact that not everything is going to work. TikTok is not going to work with every audience. Be open to testing and embrace it.

• A robust measurement program must sit behind your testing and learning program so you can measure your results, leverage the learnings and continue to grow.

• If you’re using an agency, use one that is future-led. It can keep you and your business a step ahead of the market.

Linda says marketers who understand the digital space deliver results: “It increases confidence in the marketing team’s ability when you can clearly demonstrate the value the team has delivered.”