The Five Pillars of Digital Marketing

By Dan Burrus

Advertising today is experiencing a period of profound and accelerated transformation. Technologies such as blogs, podcasts, and streaming video are permanently changing consumer attitude and behavior. The good news is that this transformation creates opportunities for everyone in terms of advertising. The key, however, is to integrate the tried and true “old media” outlets with the emerging “new media” to get more consumer engagement and better results from your advertising dollars.

Smart advertisers now realize that the trend is not going from old media outlets to new media outlets; rather, the trend is about combining the two media outlets so they work in harmony with each other. That is, the old media (TV, radio, and magazines) can be used to get the advertising message out into the marketplace, while the new media (online options) get the consumers’ engagement and response.

But before you rush out and start integrating your advertising, you need to first understand some basic tenets or pillars of digital marketing. These pillars are the foundation of your online ad campaign and give some much needed discipline to digital marketing. Use the following five pillars to enhance the engagement and response of your digital marketing campaign so you can successfully integrate your old and new media approaches.

Pillar #1: Personalization: Consumers will be more interested in your ad if it addresses their specific needs and interests. The question is, how do you personalize an ad that’s going out to millions of people? Fortunately, with digital marketing, you can personalize. In fact, the Internet allows for ever increasing ways to target and create personal experiences and ads for consumers.

For example, let’s suppose you’re a pet food manufacturer. You could run a radio ad about your pet food (old media). At the end of your ad you direct people to your web site to download coupons for free pet food (directing them to new media). Once visitors enter your site, you can ask them two or three short questions, such as whether they have a dog or a cat, how many of each type of pet they have, and ages of their pets. Just by knowing those three small pieces of information, you know a lot about that consumer and can then customize the coupons and future ads you direct to that person.

Always remember that junk advertising is really good advertising that went to the wrong person. By personalizing your advertising to your consumers, you greatly reduce the amount of junk advertising you invest in and you give people a meaningful experience with your company. Even better, when you can personalize someone’s experience on your web site, it’s like getting permission to market to them. They actually want to know what you have to offer.

Ask yourself: How can we use targeting and personalization to introduce a new product and grow brand loyalty?

Pillar #2: Communities: Two types of online communities exist: communities of interest and communities of practice. A community of practice may be all the salespeople in a company or industry, or a group of cardiologists. It’s a professional type of community where members share their ideas and best practices.

A community of interest may be people who love dogs, sailboats, or even motorcycles. It’s a hobby-type of environment where people share similar interests or passions. You can even get granular when it comes to communities of interest. For example, you can narrow down your motorcycle community to one that only includes people who drive a Harley Davidson Heritage Soft Tail Classic. The more granular you get, the more targeted you can be in giving people what they would like rather than the junk they don’t want.

Purina has an online community for both dog and cat owners. It provides expert advice and creates a place where dog or cat owners can enter a community of other dog or cat owners to share information. By setting up such a community, Purina can target their ads to the specific needs of the group. Every day, eight million pet lovers visit the community of their choice. That’s a lot of exposure and potential pet food purchases!

Ask yourself: How can hosting an electronic community of interest enhance customer interest in our products or services?

Pillar #3: Intelligent Multimedia Search: Internet searches are going through a metamorphosis. It’s no longer about typing a term into a search engine and being satisfied with sifting through the thousands, if not millions, of pages of results. Search is getting intelligent and is taking into account more than just web pages.

Intelligent Multimedia Search gives you the ability to search the Internet (or your computer) for text, graphics, video, animation, and sound using simple commands. Even better, intelligent search uses software to help the user narrow the search down to find exactly what he or she is looking for. With this technology, people can use natural language or simple questions to find exactly what they want. For example, people could search their computer, their network, or the entire Internet for a segment of a video or audio recording, and retrieve it quickly.

All the major search engines are working diligently to make searching more intelligent so people get more customized results. As an advertiser, this means you can even target specific geographic locations online. So let’s say that you have retail stores in ten different cities. You could make it so that your ads appear only when a search originates from a city where you have a store. That makes your ad more relevant to the online consumer searching for the product or service you offer.

Ask yourself: How can we use search to help consumers solve problems and find product information, including photographs, audio, and video, faster?

Pillar #4: Content: As technology evolves, new forms of content emerge. Just a few short years ago, a podcast didn’t exist. Today, they’re taking over the digital world. And once podcasts took root, it wasn’t long until we had video podcasts. The same thing happened with blogs, where we now have video blogs. We even have places like myspace.com and youtube.com where average people can create and post videos.

Because all the software needed to create these new types of content is virtually free (much of it comes pre-loaded on computers today), anyone can create video or audio and unleash their creativity. As such, advertisers can stimulate users to create content that does the advertising for them. For example, one of the recent Super Bowl ads was created by a young consumer. The company ran a contest calling for people to create their own ad for the company’s product. The grand prize winner got his or her ad broadcast during the Super Bowl. Remarkably, that winning ad ranked the third best of all the Super Bowl ads, and the company didn’t spend a dime producing it.

Ask yourself: How can we use different forms of content, produced by both professionals and amateurs, to create interest in our products?

Pillar #5: Interactivity: In the past, advertising was static. Users would sit back passively and read or watch an ad. Today, people are interacting with digital content, clicking on icons, moving things around, playing games, adding content, and in some cases creating their own content. Anytime you can get people to go beyond reading and start clicking, you’re getting consumers engaged. And engagement is the key to creating a positive outcome—action in the form of a sale.

Ask yourself: How can we add interactivity to our ads?

Think Five for Your Campaign to Thrive: As you create and implement your old and new media advertising campaign, ask yourself if you’re making use of all five pillars. If you’re not able to use them all, then decide which ones will serve you best as you integrate old and new media outlets. Remember, a new world of advertising is dawning, and the new tools are available to all. Use them. If you don’t, your competitors will.

Read other articles and learn more about Daniel Burrus.

[This article is available at no-cost, on a non-exclusive basis.  Contact PR/PR at 407-299-6128 for details and requirements.]