Out with the old; obsolete strategy 1
When I entered into the marketing world as a PR intern in 1994, digital marketing consisted of multimedia demos on CD-ROM. The World Wide Web was just starting to take off, and fax machines were preferred over email for remote communications.
Since then, the digital universe has exploded, offering marketers unprecedented opportunities to reach prospective customers. Unfortunately, many of the old dogs of digital and traditional marketing are not quick to learn new tricks.
In the following article, I will outline obsolete digital marketing strategies still in widespread use today. More importantly, I will suggest alternative approaches for each of the seven outdated techniques that are more likely to generate a positive return on investment (ROI).
Building a digital marketing department
After nearly 15 years of corporations and agencies building "digital" marketing teams, some savvy companies are realizing this is outdated thinking. In this model, companies hire "digitally savvy" marketers (aka, recent college graduates) to fill in gaps left by the traditional marketing team. The problem is that, often, neither party respects each other and, thus, collaboration is lacking.
By definition, marketing should be agnostic to media type, and so too should the strategist developing and implementing marketing campaigns. As such, companies need to conduct a skills assessment of existing marketing teams to determine who might need training or who might need to be replaced with talent that natively understands both digital and analog worlds. That doesn't mean automatically hiring recent college grads either.
While there are a host of training and consulting resources available to "teach" digital to traditional marketers, it can be just as challenging to teach traditional marketing to younger, less-experienced digital strategists. Although ensuring your marketing team is able to truly integrate digital into campaigns can be challenging, it will be a requirement for companies looking to thrive in the new millennium.
