Or WHY organic growth is no longer enough
Every day, I hear from businesses that want to see huge results via digital. Their stated goals include – huge number of views, engagement, clicks too. So you’d think they have a healthy budget in mind? Think again.
If I had a 2000₹ note for every time someone wanted us to deliver all of the above but with ‘organic’ results only, let’s just say I’d be much richer than I am right now.
There’s a huge myth that cracking content alone is key to achieving results on digital or social media. Most brands are shying from accepting that digital platforms and media are ad platforms with some different strokes to attract online audiences. Therefore, they stress on creating content and not enough on promoting it. Even when you’ve created a fabulous brand creative asset, say like a video series or an info guide, today, there are very few avenues where it can attain momentum of reach without the support of paid promotions.
Achieving digital marketing success is a combination of planning, matching content to medium, matching content to audience, focused targeting – all this backed by an adequate budget for paid media spends/ paid promotions. Unless one is only looking to score on vanity metrics, achieving results, even with right budgets takes time – time which goes into learning phase, optimisations, tweaks and more.
Pouring money into poorly planned or executed creative assets is also unlikely to deliver superior returns. Creating great content and not adequately promoting it is quite literally being half-assed about it.
Gone are the days when mild effort and a piddly budget would keep your brand top of mind on digital. Even though digital media seemingly offer expandable space for brands, the attention share you need to is only getting harder to acquire. This is a reality that brands must adapt to and accordingly adjust their budgets and expectations from these channels.
Over the years, consumers’ behaviour across digital media has been evolving. New formats are fostering new digital behaviours. Younger audiences bring with them native digital behaviours calling for highly segmented strategies for different generations present in different ways across the same media. How does a viewer on an OTT platform respond to a brand vs regular TV ad viewer? If your agency has to create a winning campaign, what are the digital components you need them to make alongside for maximum amplification?
Recently I presented a digital strategy for a financial services brand for achieving platform-specific growth. The key components covered :
- Content, contest and creative formats
- Promotions – platform-specific
- People – influencers, real users, fans and more
This strategy would look very different for a B2B business or a product-oriented B2C brand. The point is it takes an overlap of marketing thinking, brand and customer insight and digital marketing expertise, meshed with great content & healthy budgets, to deliver brand wins.
Anyone who says otherwise has some serious fine print you can’t read or worse will offer it free and waste your time.
Pavithra 