Redefining digital marketing: An approach to solving business problems

Step into most marketing departments and agencies in Singapore today and you’ll find that almost all of them have some strategy and tactics for dealing with the discipline of digital marketing.

Many Singapore agencies also have multiple-award winning teams who have developed numerous creative digital campaigns, executed brilliantly to bring greater exposure or engagement for the brand. 

But this approach to digital marketing is to me still a channel-based approach. Communicators have ingrained this channel-based thinking for years now. Previously, it was offline channels such as print, TV, radio, billboards, which are now complemented by digital channels, such as social media, forums, microsites, websites, and applications.

Having attended a recent course by the brilliant folks at Hyper Island, I’ve come to realise that we are perhaps limiting our thinking and the potential of how powerful our work can be, by only looking at digital as yet another communications channel. In my opinion, I think it can be an approach to solving business problems.

Why do I say so? Well, firstly, we have to understand the core differences between this new platform and traditional platforms. And the core differences to me are mainly two – network effects and real-time data.

Digital platforms enable the organic spread of information – just look at the “viral” effects of good content on Facebook, or the ability to optimise content for search engines. That’s the networked aspect.

Secondly, the connectedness of digital tools and platforms allows for the exchange of data in almost real-time. This in turn leads to the ability to fine-tune marketing outreach almost continuously.

This brings me to my next point – with the data and networked effects, can we go more than just doing campaigns and outreach and on to creating services / solutions driven by the marketing department? Relook the role of the marketing function from (mainly) driving communications to marketing-as-a-service?

Previously, in the absence of digital tools, creating a product or service would have been up to the product or research teams, but in today’s day and age, a marketer – who has the best understanding of the audience – can play a crucial role in ensuring that his or her function brings more value to the organisation.

One of the best examples of this is the Nike+ community which brings together products and platform to create an ecosystem that locks in a user even tighter to the Nike brand.

Social sign-on allowed for network effects, whilst users uploading running data to the platform enabled Nike to fine-tune Nike+ and create more value-added services that eventually would lead to more shoe and device sales. In addition, Nike+ was also a great brand play which helped put Nike as a leader in the running space.

While this wasn’t an idea that was driven by the marketing department (this was the brainchild of the Innovation team), it’s not hard to see how digital marketing teams can drive such initiatives. After all, we are already familiar with community building and incorporating services to create a complete ecosystem is just another step forward in thinking – one that marketers have to just push themselves a little bit more to achieve.

To move from meeting communications objectives to solving business problems, a shift in perception / mindset is required. Again, this isn’t the toughest of things to do, especially since marketers always talk about brand meaning.

If you can take a step back and think about your mission on a brand level instead of on a product level, you should be able to find a higher-level meaning for your brand which you can then use as a base for problem-solving.

An example here would be Google. While search was their first (and still is main) product, Google’s brand mission was to “make sense of the world’s data”, allowing the company to develop more services (albeit from a product perspective) such as Trends, Maps, and Analytics which have been highly successful in their own right.

This model of looking at things from a higher vantage point, which is called the Ladder of Abstraction, allows brands to define themselves independently of the industry in which they operate in.

For example, Toms is now moving from shoes to coffee by expanding their brand meaning of “improving lives” to other verticals. This enables brands to break what can sometimes be a stifling mindset that prohibits evolution, and is a tool that all marketers should employ in their arsenal whenever it comes to planning and strategy.  

All that said, this article is not a critique of marketers today, but rather a call-to-arms to fellow marketers. I hope that what I’ve shared above will spark some thoughts of the greater potential of the marketing function in contributing to the business, not by just driving up revenues for individual product lines but creating more long-term value.

By nature, we are one of the biggest generators of creativity in any organisation. Let’s all aim to harness that energy to make a greater stake for the function’s value in the boardroom.