The Holy Grail of Digital Marketing

By Tom Kuthy, VP, Marketing & Business Development

What if one agency could place, track, measure, aggregate, and report on the effectiveness of all digital media and allocate spending according to the relative effectiveness of each? That would be the Holy Grail of digital marketing.

As Search marketers, our world is, and always has been, about placing, measuring, reporting and optimizing the performance of Search media. But when it comes to looking across non-Search digital media, we have a few challenges to overcome.

1. We do not always have access to the data from other digital marketing like e-mail and display.
2. Even when we do, the purveyors and proponents of other digital media do not always want to hold their media up to the scrutiny of rigorous measurement, and risk getting their budget allocations reduced (or, surprise, increased!)
3. It is difficult to tease out the interaction effects of different digital media upon one another or even to get a consistent dashboard that helps make the trade off decisions transparent.
4. It takes a seasoned business leader to develop and advocate recommendations through the client’s chain of command.

So how do we as an agency stop looking for the Holy Grail of digital marketing and start actually finding it? Three simple to articulate, but hard to do, steps come to mind:

1. Data Aggregation – The critical first step in finding the Holy Grail is to aggregate all data into a single data warehouse where it can be accessed easily and consistently viewed across media.
2. Analytics – Data alone will not tell the story. Sophisticated analysis needs to be applied to draw statistically significant conclusions from the mountains of data being generated.
3. Sound Business Judgment – Mature business leaders with seasoned business minds need to review the conclusions and provide the client’s with robust recommendations as to what kinds of marketing actions should be taken based on the analysis.

Look for more activity on all of these fronts from Resolution Media in 2010