Online marketing, offline marketing: it's all the same these days

By Nur Bremmen: Staff reporter on 20 November, 2015

Remember when marketing executives had to convince their bosses to put time and resources into “that internet thing”? Well, bar a few stubborn hangers-on, it’s apparently safe to say those days are very firmly past.

According to Gartner’s 2015-2016 Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Spend Survey, 98% of marketing executives from large companies in North America and the UK agree that online and offline marketing are merging.

Respondents represent organisations with more than US$500 million in annual revenue across seven industries: financial services, high tech, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods (CPG), media, retail and transportation/hospitality. The survey took place between May and July 2015 and marks the fourth year that Gartner has surveyed marketers on spending priorities and marketing operations.

There is little doubt that digital marketing is now mainstream,” said Yvonne Genovese, group vice president at Gartner. “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.”

Read more: The symbiosis of content marketing and SEO

Ten per cent of marketers say they have moved beyond digital marketing techniques and are expanding marketing’s role to create new digitally led business models. The blurring of the physical and digital worlds represents opportunities for marketers to apply customer insights to create and test new digitally led experiences and business models. Digital commerce is surging, capturing 11% of the digital marketing budget (up from 8 per cent in 2014) as marketers become more accountable for driving results.

“The rise in digital commerce is an opportunity for marketers,” said Jake Sorofman, research vice president at Gartner. “There was a time when marketing and selling were two distinct disciplines. In many cases, digital merges these two into a single, continuous activity from initial awareness, through engagement, conversion, transaction and repeat purchase. Marketers can now tie spend to revenue. In fact, it’s becoming a mandate.”

Two main factors are driving marketers’ interest in digital commerce: the need to point to tangible results from marketing investments, and the recognition that companies need more than a commerce platform to sell. In the past, we’ve seen digital commerce operations wholly disconnected from the marketing engine. Today, we’re seeing integration between marketing and digital commerce as two parts of a single discipline, where marketers bring everything from content marketing and brand storytelling to advanced analytics and multichannel campaign management to optimise digital commerce across channels.

Read more: 10 reasons it’s time for South Africa to wake up to programmatic buying

B2C companies have long been considered more sophisticated in digital commerce, but we’re seeing growing appetite by B2B companies under pressure to reach customers directly with digital commerce initiatives. They are looking to engage customers directly to better understand their needs, preferences and behaviours.

As CMOs face the digital transition, the survey showed that overall marketing budgets are on the rise. This year, 61 per cent of respondents said that marketing spending will be, on average, 11 per cent of company revenue, up from 10 per cent of company revenue last year. That one percentage point change represents a sizable increase — 10 per cent, year over year — in marketing spend.

“Bigger budgets, however, come with sizable expectations,” said Mr Sorofman. “Marketing is expected to drive profitable growth through the acquisition, retention and expansion of the most valuable customer relationships. As customer buying journeys and customer expectations expand, so, too, does marketing’s scope of responsibility. As a result, the marketing remit now often includes driving broad-mandate customer experience, digital commerce and innovation initiatives.”

Nur is an enigma with a passion for creating words. He recently entered a love affair with technology and chorizo sausages. He travels a lot — you catch him, if you can, at a Silicon Cape event every now and again. More

Online marketing, offline marketing: it"s all the same these days

When Donald Trump brags about his Facebook success, it's a sure sign you should be skeptical

Workers began removing the large letters spelling out the Trump name from the shuttered Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City last year. (Mark Makela/Reuters)

The (maybe) presidential campaign of D. J. Trump issued a highly Trumpian news release in response to news that his announcement  Tuesday made a big splash on Facebook.

“Trump Smashes Social Records Following Presidential Announcement,” it yelled. “3.4 million Facebook users in the US generated 6.4 million interactions regarding the launch of his campaign, the highest by far, among all 2016 GOP candidates.”

Why? Because “Mr. Trump has a tremendous audience across the country,” as the news release notes — with probably more accuracy than it intended.

In general, how something does on social media is a bad way to gauge success. In politics? It’s especially dumb, as we’ve noted before. We’re comparing apples to cameras to a 1973 Deep Purple LP when we pit Donald Trump launching  Tuesday afternoon against Martin O’Malley launching on the weekend against Hillary Clinton launching a campaign that starts off 14 miles in front of the competition. And then we’re using that comparison to try and predict tomorrow’s lottery numbers. This is the first contested presidential campaign in which Facebook is so dominant. We have no baseline of comparison in politics.

What we do know is that online fame seems to help. The extent to which campaign launches generate interest from individual Facebook users and get “interactions” on the social platform is loosely correlated to how active the candidates already were on Facebook — or at least how much interest they got. We compared user interest and interactions within 24 hours of the launch to how many followers each had on Facebook the day of the announcement, and voila. (Clinton is in italics because data from the day of her launch was not available. Instead, we used today’s figure.)

As we noted before, the two people getting the most attention on Facebook last fall were Clinton and Ted Cruz — numbers 1 and 3 around Trump on the users/interactions scale. (Notice, too, that Trump “smashed social records” — in the sense that he did worse than Clinton.)

Clinton, Trump and Cruz are outliers. Or maybe Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee are; they didn’t do as well as you might have expected given their high follower counts. It’s hard to say, because we don’t really know what this means. It is not the case that Trump did a lot of organizing around Facebook; it is pretty clear, too, that not all of those interactions were of the “hey, I’m voting for this guy” type. It’s just … a number. It’s bigger than the number for the Nikon, but smaller than the number for “Who Do We Think We Are,” (to continue the joke from above).

Here’s one real thing we can look at: How those interactions compared to candidates’ standing in the polls. We compare the Real Clear Politics average from seven days after the launch to the number of interactions in those first 24 hours. There’s essentially no link at all.

(Notice, too, that we had to take out Hillary Clinton and the Democrats because they’re on a different scale of support. Another way in which comparing Clinton to Trump is tricky!)

If you’re wondering how these figures correlate to rate of change in poll numbers, we actually get some correlation — stronger correlation than between followers at launch and the number of interactions. Cruz saw the biggest jump after 14 days and the most interactions within 24 hours. Rubio saw the second-biggest jump … but fewer interactions than Rand Paul, who didn’t see as big an increase in the polls.

But Paul was doing better anyway. And Cruz announced first. And all sorts of other things that come into play in polling. This is a classic correlation/causation conundrum.

We also have a smaller data set. We’ll see what happens with Trump. Maybe he’ll prove the validity of the last graph, jumping up in the polls. Perhaps he’ll end up more like the graph above it, staying mired in the lower tiers of the Republican candidates.

The ferocity with which Trump pushed out those Facebook numbers, though, reminds us that we have these numbers because of marketing: Marketing from Facebook; marketing from Trump. And for that reason, if no other, it’s very much worth defaulting to skepticism.

In short: We don’t know what Facebook numbers mean, if anything. So we should stop pretending we do.

When Donald Trump brags about his Facebook success, it"s a sure sign you should be skeptical