Point Counterpoint: Is Digital Marketing A Core Skill? Mon January 12, 2009 How important is it for someone in charge of sales and marketing in a hotel, at a destination or any other travel provider to become proficient in the world of digital marketing? Is it just another specialized tool (as put forth by Laurence) or has online marketing caused a sea change in the way marketing is done in any medium and therefore it is now a core skill set (as put forth by Tim)? Laurence Bernstein Laurence Bernstein is the founder and managing partner of BC3 Strategies - The Bay Charles Consulting Company based in Toronto. Tim Peter Tim is the Managing Director at Leading Interactive Reservations.     Digital marketing is not a core skill.   Digital marketing is not a core skill for sales/marketing professionals any more than typing or mimeographing and licking stamps were core skills for marketing professionals in 1975. It may be a skill, but it is certainly not the heart of the marketing discipline. The heart of the marketing discipline is the ability to bring relevant products to the attention of primed buyers at the right time, in the right place at the right price. If the customer is not in the market for your product (is not a primed buyer), if your product is not relevant to the buyer (in terms of functionality, quality, and extrinsic and intrinsic value), and you don’t bring it to the attention of the buyer at the right time, you will not make a sale. In a simplistic way, that sums up the complexity of what marketing really is. Digital marketing is one resource that can help accomplish this objective. Because of its breadth, it is possible to capture more primed buyers in a short time, or capture details about who they are so that they hear or see your message at the right time, with the most relevant product. However, it is not the only way of accomplishing this. Human word of mouth, for instance, performs exactly the same function; or simple direct mail; or personal sales or even, heaven forbid, mass advertising. When all of these things work together, it is like a symphony. As you remove components the music becomes thinner, but the music is still there. Ask yourself the question: in ten years time when digital looks completely different from how it looks today, will the fundamentals of marketing still be the same (relevant product, primed buyer, right place, right time)? You would be misleading yourself if you answered “No.” The digital resources to help accomplish these fundamentals will have morphed. But marketing fundamental remain the same, as they have throughout the transitioning of the marketplace from catalogue, to newspapers, to radio, to television, to direct mail (again – catalogue redux) to email, to websites, to blog, to mobile, to social networking sites, and so on to the next next big thing. The more the world turns to digital marketing as a means of executing strategy, the importance of fluency in the underlying principles of marketing grows exponentially. As possibilities become increasingly fantastic, and the speed of accomplishing the fantastic increases, it is essential to be able to understand the business implications of each new level of fantastic, immediately; it is equally essential to be able to make strategically sound decisions based on the outcome of the fantastic immediately, if not sooner. At this point, while knowing the mechanism by which a networking site resembles a viral expansion loop is nice, I suggest that knowing how to profit by adjusting prices in the virally changing climate created by the loop, is more important. In other words, digital marketing skills are cute and may impress some people occasionally. But then so was the ability to stuff three hundred envelopes an hour for a direct mail campaign, or edit the music in a radio commercial. Even if these skills were core skills, which they are not, they are likely to be out of date by Friday. The real core skills, the strategic understanding of the fundamentals of marketing, will never be out of date.   Digital marketing will make you or break you as a marketer.   Meet Dave. Dave is 44 years old. He works as a civil engineer. He and his wife Ellen have two kids aged 14 and 9 and take two 5-day family vacations a year - once during their kids' spring break, once in late summer. Their household income is around $108,000 annually. So, how come he bought your product through media placed on MySpace? Your target demographic doesn't use sites like that. Or do they? How can you possibly know? Both the activities customers engage in and the media channels they use have multiplied. Fragmented. Challenged marketers like never before to locate customers, listen to what they want and lead them in new ways through the steps of awareness, interest, desire and action. Cable, broadcast and satellite television let your customers watch hundreds of channels in real-time, or when they choose, with video on demand or Tivo. Radio offers similar options, with podcasts providing the on demand audio model. There are at least five different popular game consoles and handhelds with dozens of best-selling games. There are thousands of media outlets. Over 150 million websites, blogs, and vlogs. Over 1 billion mobile phones. The list goes on. For all its talk of putting the right product in front of the right customer at the right time, “traditional” marketing has long lacked the tools to actually achieve that goal. The best marketers continually challenge themselves to improve their ability to talk to their customer. Digital - with its emphasis on measurement and just-in-time delivery - provides marketers with the ability to understand their customers' needs and place appropriate messages to those most primed to buy. Sounds pretty "core" to me. Take a look at the changes wrought by digital: • Product - crowdsourcing, data mining, improved consumer research • Price - price monitoring, price forecasting • Place - the move for many from physical product to bits (such as downloadable ebooks, music and movies), the associated zero distribution cost • Promotion - behavioral targeting and content targeting as in the example of "Dave" above Marketers who don't speak this language will quickly choke on their competitors' digital dust. It's certainly true that some tools and techniques digital marketers tout today will be replaced in the future. Today's darling, pay-per-click advertising, already shows signs that it may have reached its saturation point. But suggesting that digital is “just another tool” is much like assuming the automobile or jet airplane were “just another” form of transportation. Digital represents a fundamental shift in how to reach your customers and learn what matters to them. And assuming that a core skill of marketing isn't to continually improve your ability to reach your customers is fantasy. View More Offers | Link This Article | Comments [2] | Enter a comment 2 Comments 1 Posted by: Jill on Thu July 10, 2008 - 10:12 AM Sorry Laurence, I'm with Tim. Digital skills are not 'cute'. They are an integral part of the marketing process that will continue to change and evolve. More and more business and especially communication ins happening online and digitally. If you don't participate and understand this aspect, how can you compete? Laurence, I'm curious to know if you have a blog, purchased something online, use any of the social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, etc? Do you think this is 'cute', or a normal part of your day personally and professionally? Jill (www.twitter.com/Jilska, LinkedIn.com/in/jillhowardallen, friendfeed.com/jilska 2 Posted by: Mike Moran on Mon January 5, 2009 - 3:37 AM Of course, the simple idea that marketing fundamentals apply to digital marketing is true. Everything we know about marketing still works, as Lawrence points out. But to think that digital is not a fundamental shift in the way marketing is done, one that is far bigger than anything we've seen in our lifetimes, is wrong. Tim rightly explains how the changes we are seeing force marketers to confront a whole new set of skills. The thing that makes digital marketing so wrenching for most people is that they need to think about their jobs differently. Sure the basics are the same, but what we do day-in and day-out have changed markedly. If that doesn't describe a new set of skills, I don't know what would. What Lawrence is missing is that you can need a new set of skills without losing all the old ones that still work. Share this: Send To A Friend