You’re Not Marketing at Them, You’re Marketing with Them

Budget Strategy and ROI (Part 4 of 6)

This series asks the tough questions about evolving marketing strategies and the benefits and returns you should expect and plan for.

Re-defining marketing success

Marketing in the online space requires a change from conventional thinking — but just a little one. Good business practice suggests calculating your Return on Investment to judge success. This is certainly sound advice. If someone says measuring ROI is waste of time in the online world, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

But … quantifying it simply in dollars spent versus dollars earned just won’t work. Try tracking the exact return on a big TV ad campaign — yup, leaps of faith are part of the equation.

Eyeballs and impressions aren’t telling you the whole story, either

Basing your campaign’s success solely on traffic generated and click-through rates is a mistake — these are poor metrics for success. The launch of a microsite or launch of a corporate Twitter account will almost always show big spikes in these numbers and give a false sense of success.

To gauge online marketing success, rethink the numerator of ROI: return. Stop thinking about dollars and cents. With free as the prevailing pay structure online, you have to look at returns differently.

Trust is the new currency your audience is ready to spend — and positive, honest digital influence is how you are going to earn it.

Don’t just hear … listen

Allocate your online marketing budget toward activities and content that encourage the engagement of your target audience. Provide them a conduit to communicate with you, and listen to what they have to say about your products or services.

Communities online surround and build upon central ideas. Don’t push a corp comm sales pitch into a community discussion. It won’t engage them at all — no matter how motivated they are to consume. In fact, it’s counter-productive and dangerous, as the community will rebel against any and all communication they view as unproductive.

To develop your brand in the online world, you must create a relationship with your audience and participate with them, not at them. The return on your investment will be a stronger brand reputation with the right customers, who view your brand and product as trustworthy.

The takeaway

Focus your online marketing activities on contributing to and gaining insight from your audience. The return will be much more valuable than a predictable traffic spike.

My questions to you

How are you currently gauging your online marketing ROI? Is digital influence part of the equation yet?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."