This post gives a brief introduction to digital marketing, how it differs from traditional marketing, and why digital marketers need to have an understanding of current web technologies.
The digital marketing landscape has made it much easier for marketers to measure and evaluate the efficiency of marketing strategies and campaigns. At the same time, digital marketing is a lot more complex than traditional marketing, and digital marketers not only need to have an understanding of traditional marketing fundamentals but also of web technologies and how to read web code.
Digital and traditional marketing, what’s the difference?
On a fundamental level, digital marketing (DM) and traditional marketing (TM) has the same aim of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large (Ama.org, 2017). The main difference, however, is that DM has given marketers unprecedented access to market data, powerful tools to measure the effects of executed marketing activities, and sophisticated instruments to identify and reach distinct audiences and customers with personalised targeted messages. With digital marketing being a technology-based methodology built on the technologies that drive the web; digital marketers, therefore, need to have an in-depth understanding of these technologies to be able to plan, evaluate, implement, and perform efficient DM-strategies.
The principal key to becoming an efficient digital marketer is the ability to read web code, mainly HTML and basic JavaScript. With code efficiency at the centre of a strong digital marketing plan and a provision for effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), a digital marketer without at least a basic understanding of web-code will not be able to create efficient SEO strategies or even understand how to conform to errors and recommendations discovered when testing and benchmarking web assets.
Without the ability to read and understand web-code digital marketers also will not be able to evaluate the quality (or lack of quality) of code written by team members, free-lancers and external agencies which is critical to ensure that deliverables conform to stated OKRs and specs.
With apps becoming a central part of many organisations’ marketing strategies, DM-marketers also need to have a deep understanding of app development methodologies and their individual strengths and weaknesses. As an example, it is vital that DM marketers not only have the competence to evaluate whether a planned app strategy should be based on a web-, hybrid or native methodology, but also which methodology that is optimal in respect to performance vs. budget.
DM-marketers also need to have an in-depth understanding of the technologies that drive the web and need to work hard to keep their knowledge relevant and up-to-date. A good example is when WebKit rolled out their ‘Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature’ (WebKit, 2017) which prevent cross-domain tracking by blocking third-party cookies and the possibility to track customers and web visitors as they travel the web and which wrecked analytics strategies of thousands of organisations round the world failing to adapt to it. In simple terms, marketers lacking an understanding of cookies didn’t understand how this initiative by WebKit affected their analytics- and marketing strategies—and even less how to adapt their current analytics strategies to these new circumstances.
The DM-landscape is complex, and today’s marketers need to learn—not only traditional marketing theory including Kotler’s p’s (Kotler and Armstrong, 2016), Porter’s five forces (Porter, 1998) and Hofstede’s theory of cultural dimensions (Geert-hofstede, 2017) etc.,—but also how to read and write web code and to work hard to keep their skills relevant and up-to-date. In digital marketing, as in any area of business, it is, of course, possible to get along with just knowing the basics. To stand strong in today’s highly competitive markets, however, you need to roll up your sleeves.
- References
- Ama.org. (2017). Definition of Marketing. [online] Available at: https://www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-Marketing.aspx [Accessed 18 Jun. 2017].
- Ec.europa.eu. (2017). Cookies – European commission. [online] Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm [Accessed 19 Jun. 2017].
- Geert-hofstede. (2017). Dimensions – Geert Hofstede. [online] Available at: https://geert-hofstede.com/national-culture.html [Accessed 19 Jun. 2017].
- Kotler, P. and Armstrong, G. (2016). Principles of marketing. Harlow: Pearson Education.
- NativeScript. (2017). NativeScript. [online] Available at: https://www.nativescript.org/ [Accessed 18 Jun. 2017].
- PageSpeed Insights. (2017). PageSpeed Insights. [online] Available at: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ [Accessed 18 Jun. 2017].
- Porter, M. (1998). Competitive strategy. New York: Free Press.
- React Native. (2017). React Native | A framework for building native apps using React. [online] Available at: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/ [Accessed 18 Jun. 2017].
- ThemeForest. (2017). Website Templates & Themes from ThemeForest. [online] Available at: https://themeforest.net/ [Accessed 18 Jun. 2017].
- W3C Validator. (2017). The W3C Markup Validation Service. [online] Available at: https://validator.w3.org/ [Accessed 18 Jun. 2017].
- WebKit. (2017). Intelligent Tracking Prevention. [online] Available at: https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention/ [Accessed 18 Jun. 2017].