What’s wrong with Digital Marketing?

By Jaco Lintvelt, Managing Director, Incubeta Africa 

Those involved in the industry often forget that digital marketing is still relatively nascent.  Its dependence on rapidly evolving technology, constantly shifting user expectations, and the burden of privacy regulations can make it challenging for marketing leaders to keep pace. But more importantly, digital marketing professionals are often guilty of overcomplicating things. The unfortunate consequences are that CMOs will frequently neglect the function, denying it the time, focus, and the budget required to deliver on its true potential.

The problem can be most clearly seen when comparing digital to television. TV has barely changed in the 83 years since the first advert was aired ahead of a US baseball game in 1941. However, there have been seismic shifts in digital marketing since the first banner ad was published in 1994.

Simple is better

At its heart, television is reasonably straightforward, and people will always prefer engaging with a medium that is easy to understand. This is the challenge for the digital marketing industry right now. We must make it easy for people to understand and engage with it.

When something is complex or difficult to understand, it’s easy to lose your focus and become distracted by what you may perceive as being important (like AI or cloud for marketing or analytics). Meanwhile, your business may not even have the fundamentals in place.

One of the biggest challenges is undoubtedly the continued siloing of brand marketing and performance marketing. This is likely done in an effort to better understand what is required of each, but this hard delineation cuts companies off from the many benefits of an integrated approach.

Another massive challenge is when customers don’t correctly understand digital measurement, especially regarding attribution. For example, without a complete understanding, it is easy to invest focus and budget into understanding complex multimedia models when they have neglected the measurement building blocks that will allow them to make an immediate impact.

Moving the needle requires teamwork

We know that digital marketing remains one of the best investments in efficacy. However, there is also a misunderstanding about what delivers profits. Studies show that creative quality remains the most significant ROI multiplier. So when having conversations with business leaders, it’s vital for digital partners to outline that no single aspect of digital marketing can move the brand forward and to insist that efforts must be integrated.

Our experience has shown that the key to delivering on this is having a select group of partners who are happy to work together without getting precious about their areas of expertise. CMOs must surround themselves with agency partners who will put the brand first and be prepared to work towards that integrated outcome.

Industry responsibility

Fortunately, it’s not all bad. If we acknowledge that digital marketing is still in its infancy, we must also acknowledge that it is ripe with opportunity.

If agencies and brands can focus on keeping things simple and getting the basics right, they will soon be on the right track to experiment with the unbelievably exciting opportunities that some of the newer tech is affording us. When brands, agencies and specialist partners embark on an intentional collaboration, opportunities are far more likely to be realised.

But this also means brands must invest in their people to ensure they have the right skills to move into that bright new future.

Constant upskilling and learning are imperative for both agencies and brands. Digital marketing professionals must collectively take responsibility for nurturing talent to ensure we have enough of the right skills to keep pace with these rapid changes.

Both agencies and digital marketers working in-house must also foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability that allows our teams to easily bridge the gap between theory and practice. We should be working together to inject a culture of fair compensation, diversity, and collaboration to ensure sustainability and long-term success.

Finally, we must build a culture of open dialogue between agencies and our clients where we uncomplicate our conversations and solutions so that brands win, not our obsession with the next big thing.

If Digital Marketing is going to claim its rightful position on the CMO’s board agenda and budget, we should be focused on continuous improvement. It’s critical that agencies and specialist partners help clients build strong foundations based on fundamental marketing principles. Only then will we be best placed to design and implement some exciting new solutions that are guaranteed to shift our constantly evolving industry once again.