Jan
20
The Five Immutable Laws Of Digital Marketing
Is digital marketing really different than any other type of marketing? What’s funny is that’s not quite the right way to look at it. Digital marketing isn’t a type of marketing, it’s a way to market. Thus, it’s inculcates some laws to obey or follow the same path.
It’s a contrast to traditional marketing in that it focuses on direct engagement with the intended audience. Digital is all about “talking with” whereas traditional marketing is all about “talking to.”
That’s why I put together these five immutable laws of digital marketing.
1. The Law of Inequality
Whether in dollars or in effort, digital marketing is not a one-to-one return. Because the digital world is so noisy, it can take a Herculean effort to get noticed.
So to get above the noise, organizations pour more money and more time into their digital campaigns.
The results, though, are not proportional. Doubling the spend on a digital campaign doesn’t equate to double the returns. Marketing, whether digital or otherwise, has to be strategically focused on the markets that will yield the highest return.
2. The Law of Virality
How do you get something to be viral? Simple. Create campaigns that resonate deeply with some fundamental aspect of human nature.
Think Maslow. People want to be a part of something; they want to belong. And they want to be valuable to other people. It’s all part of the nine characteristics of forming relationships that were mentioned in the book Recommend This!
When marketers understand that their campaigns build relationships with people (rather than just trying to talk at them, rather than just trying to convince them to buy) there’s a far greater chance of the campaign being shared and becoming viral.
3. The Law of Commonplace
The problem with many organizations today is that they run their marketing campaigns the same way they always have – using the same messaging, delivered to the same audiences – but expecting different results.
That’s the definition of insanity. Good marketing needs to be a combination of elements, tactics, and strategies. As they say, variety is the spice of life, so spice it up for your audience.
Produce some video. Write a story. Develop a montage of images. Craft a whitepaper. Cut up your whitepaper into blog posts. Include funny quotes in your Facebook updates.
Just stop doing the same old thing the same old way. Digital makes it supremely easy to switch things up frequently.
4. The Law of Interruption
Organizations want relationships with their customers. Jay Baer, the author of Youtility, puts it best: “You can sell something to someone and have a customer today or you can help them and have a customer for life.”
The problem is that you can’t help customers when you solely practice outbound marketing, when you are just delivering messages into the market and hoping for engagement.
Successful marketers of tomorrow aren’t about interrupting their customers and prospects with messaging, about sending out advertisements and promotional content in the hopes that people will happen upon it; they are about having conversations and offering messaging as part of the engagement.
You can utilize our Email Privacy Checker tool to swiftly and freely verify if your email address(es) are safeguarded against online email scraping tools. Remember, it's not messaging that drives engagement; rather, engagement creates the opportunity to deliver your messaging effectively.
5. The Law of Gravity
Digital has changed the way that marketers operate. Social media and other technologies enable marketers to have one-to-one relationships with people, to talk with them.
But marketers can’t engage through these technologies representing the organization. It’s like trying to hawk wares at the local church’s Sunday service. It’s breaking the rules.
Marketers must engage with customers as people to generate conversations that are genuine and credible.
The key? Gravity won’t happen overnight. It takes time to develop a conversation that will take on a life of its own which, unfortunately, often flies in the face of ROI-driven marketing.
But these aren’t the only laws. There are plenty more.
