If you’re a marketer, and you’re not living under a rock, you know the world of marketing is undergoing rapid change. As an industry, we have coined countless new terms for this new marketing paradigm: digital marketing, internet marketing, inbound marketing, search engine marketing, social marketing, or any number of other buzzwords that have found their way into our collective consciousness.
No matter what you call it, the reality is, many marketing organizations are having trouble keeping up. According to Oracle’s Eloqua, only one in four marketers feel that they will have integrated modern tactics into their plans by the end of this year. That means that a whopping 75 percent of marketers aren’t making the cut.
So how do you make sure that you are in the 25 percent that successfully integrates modern internet marketing tactics and maintains a competitive advantage?
A marketing ecosystem
Having worked with a number of clients struggling with this question, we’ve observed that most marketing teams have taken component parts of this new paradigm and arbitrarily added them to their traditional marketing strategy. They have attempted to fit blogging, or twitter, or SEO into the same mold they use for direct mail or print advertisements.
Unfortunately, it’s just not that simple, because components of digital marketing don’t follow the same patterns, and the rules are vastly different. You need to take a more holistic approach.
Think of it this way: in a well-developed digital marketing strategy, you are building a marketing ecosystem, not a marketing funnel. Each component of your strategy needs to interact with the others, and above all, everything must be digitally tracked.
Your customers won’t all act alike, and they certainly won’t follow a singular linear path down a funnel that you’ve predetermined. It is now crucial that marketers create dynamic pathways for customer to interact on their own terms.
Check out the graphic below for details on what you need to consider in your marketing ecosystem (see it larger here):
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