Is “Digital Marketing” a redundant phrase today?

August 11, 2016: Quietly, but inexorably, the “digital” component of marketing is making its presence felt throughout the panoply of marketing strategies and tactics.

As Gartner’s Yvonne Genovese put it recently, “marketers no longer make a clear distinction between offline and online marketing disciplines. As customers opt for digitally led experiences, digital marketing stops being a discrete discipline and instead becomes the context for all marketing. Digital marketing is now marketing in a digital world.”

Gartner’s data backs this assertion up. Its survey of 330 U.S. organizations yielded the following data points:

98 percent of respondents affirmed that “offline and online marketing are merging.”
33 percent of respondents reported that “digital techniques are fully incorporated into their marketing operations.”
71 percent of respondents reported having an “innovation budget” in which digital tactics are the focus.

Didit’s Kevin Lee observed the same trends in play in a recent interview with OMCP – an online marketing certification group:

“I think we’ve gotten so far down the path of digital marketing that it’s really hard to find any untouched portions of marketing where there is no digital component, and even if there is still a penny-saver being published with classified ads, my guess is the call-to-action is an email address now, right? So, everything is digital; it’s just how digital is it, and how does it fit into the overall strategy of the business and the overall marketing strategy.”

The challenge – for marketers and agencies alike – is in being able to master the granular specialties of digital marketing — which include a bewildering number of methodologies which are in themselves highly technical – and strategically align and combine them to meet the particular and highly individualized needs of each business or client. As Kevin puts it,

“You’ve got almost like a factory (situation) going on where there’s somebody’s job just to put the tires on the vehicle, right? They don’t know how to install the engine, but overall, you still need a process to get the entire car built, and in the same way with digital marketing, somebody has the big picture, right, and they may not have a really, really deep knowledge of every single step that is taken along the way to the point that they could step into the digital assembly line and implement the canonical tags strategy around duplicate content. I mean, you need to be really in the weeds to know what that even means.”

The challenge for marketers and agencies alike is to master the granular specialties of digital marketing without losing sight of the big picture.

Using Kevin’s auto factory metaphor, one needs a wide range of talent to make a successful Mustang or Corvette: “high level” talents such as design, engineering, logistics, market research, and psychology, and “low level” talent that works its magic at the humble but indispensable “nuts and bolts” level.

Successfully getting these disparately talented people to align their efforts for the greater good – speaking the same language, sharing the same goals, and pulling together, is what ultimately differentiates marketing pros from their less holistically-minded brethren. It’s not easy to pull this off — but in a world in which digital has become the context for every known form of marketing — it’s “Job #1.”

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