We recently blogged about digital marketing being a fast moving, rapidly evolving field. In particular, we saw how ad platforms like Google and Facebook are introducing an innovation almost every week.
This rapid change is making executing successful digital marketing campaigns more and more challenging.
Doing successful digital marketing was never very easy. Though to organizations looking to implement digital marketing, it seems an easy enough task. There is the DIY (do-it-yourself) option e.g. Google encourages small businesses to create their own Google AdWords account. Then there is the option of engaging one of the many digital agencies out there.
How difficult can digital marketing be after all ? We all visit Facebook pages, search on Google, browse websites and view online ads every day anyway, goes the thinking, and have a comfort level with digital. There are online and offline training programmes available. So learning and mastering the medium ought to be easy. So goes the thinking.
Digital marketing if done well results in real growth of the business.
The fact of the matter is that doing digital marketing well has always been challenging. By doing well we mean doing digital marketing that gives good ROI for the money spent and which can be scaled up to make a significant business impact.
Doing digital marketing well requires mastering and deploying multiple skills viz. consumer behaviour, copy, visual design, UI/UX, AdWords and other ad platforms, web technology and web analytics. And as digital marketing is in use across nearly all types of industries, it requires a digital marketing team with the domain understanding and experience of diverse industry sectors.
The key difficulty in doing digital marketing well, however, is this. Since the ad platforms are getting more sophisticated (cf. new features being launched every week), it needs a team which is sharp enough to capitalize on these opportunities. Improvements in AdWords, Facebook Ads and other platforms are being made by some of the smartest computer engineers there are on the planet today. To be able to deploy such sophisticated features to the optimum, an A1 digital marketing team is very much needed.
Our experience is that if an organization does hire an A1 digital marketing team, it gets a minimum 2X improvement in ROI compared to a team of average calibre. Hiring the best available team (agency) is always the wise decision to take.
