I have heard a lot of us in digital industry blaming the client for the challenges we face, things like:
“Marketers need to allocate a larger portion of their budget on Digital.
The client needs to stop treating Digital as the second fiddle to mainline.
We are a necessary add on but not important enough to be an equal or a sizeable partner.
Shit Man! 7 days to complete a microsite, Crazy?!”
These statements are probably true to varying degrees but I do believe the rot also lies within. Something most of us, in our urge to win the next client or increase the bottom line seem to forget.
How many digital presentations have you seen which really talk about brand or strategy? (And no, copy paste of presentations downloaded from SlideShare does not count!) . Up till 2 years back most digital agencies did not have planners, even today a lot of them don’t. We are in the business of marketing or brand building yet we usually don’t find it worthwhile to understand what makes or builds a brand or how it will evolve across various aspects of the digital world today and tomorrow. Rather a pitch is usually statistics to competitor analysis to “this is how your website will look” and “Twitter, Facebook activity plan”.
The why and where next is usually missing.
CPM, CPC, CPL etc; We love to measure and if something is not measurable in absolutes, some agency will find a way to measure and sell it. Social Media which started off as a beautiful way of understanding and connecting with customers, building product affinity –all the age old basic rules of branding has been reduced to how many ‘likes’ your page has or the number of ‘people talking about you’. Never mind that most people who have joined the page have done it for the contest with the free iPad or the holiday giveaway or even to check out the hot pictures in the model hunt contest. As long as the numbers are there, relevancy and consumer connect can come second.
Some agencies now even have a ‘cost per like’ model and a lot of them hire people to create fake profiles or ‘seed content’ but since all we want is numbers nobody is asking what those numbers really are!
It’s a beautiful evolved medium that we are marketing. You can measure a lot, right from who’s sending more people onto your platform or ad campaign, whether it’s paid media or social media or search. Which ad units and sizes contribute to better results, not just clicks but conversions. Do the customers who buy from us also follow us on Twitter and what is the social influence of these customers (via SalesForce etc).
Yet we seem to be walking up a completely blind alley or talking in generalities like total page views, clicks, average time on site rather than specific segments and metrics like loyalty, recency and amplification.
For a medium which allows us to evaluate and optimize and get more bang from the buck we are content with getting less.
Few months back a gentleman approached me. He had just started a digital agency and wanted to partner with me for work. The interesting bit was his opening pitch, “Since I don’t know or understand digital I would like you to do that part”. It’s not a crime not to know but ‘not want to know’!? Yet this gentleman was and still is selling digital. Just picking up a few jargons along the way and learning how the cost sheet operates. Starting a digital agency and more specifically a social media agency has become just that-now everybody is an expert and everyone can have their own.
I am all for entrepreneurship and building a better value proposition but isn’t ‘value’ the keyword here? Just because digital is the hottest sector doesn’t mean you should enter it before understanding it.
This is the first part of the 2-Series article, would love to hear your perspectives. The aim of this is not to criticize but to honestly look within and probably re-evaluate what we can do better.
Saurabh Parmar is the CEO of Brandlogist Communications and is also a visiting faculty for Digital Marketing at IIMC,9.9 SOC, PRCIMS.
