With the ubiquity, speed and access of online messages, not to mention their perceived low cost, it is all too easy to think that anyone can do marketing and that any online post is going to help sell our product or service.

Suddenly marketing is within everyone’s reach and whilst many may use analytics and other techniques to measure effectiveness, there is often a lack of rigour in the very basics and fundamentals of the marketing cycle.

This is something very evident in my work as an external EU expert, analysing and assessing promotional campaigns for agri-food products. Digital is there in the mix often together with more traditional channels, but the foundations the campaign is built on are often on rocky ground.

Marketing has not been invented by the millennials and Generation X nor have new online channels redefined the basic structure of a marketing campaign. Yes, they offer new outlets for our messages and we can now talk about inbound as well as outbound marketing, and targeting is now much more efficient and direct. But if we don’t establish exactly who we are targeting and why, then those channels might as well be sealed with concrete.
Marketing as we understand it began during the Industrial Revolution as society experienced rapid social changed motivated by scientific and technological innovations – exactly what we have been experiencing over the last 30 years.

Consumer goods became more available as mass production methods developed to serve an ever growing market. This in turn led to a need for producers to look for ways to inform their customers about their new products.

By the 1960s (the Madmen generation) the importance of a separate marketing department became more apparent and the managers began to be involved in strategic planning. Fast forward to the 1990s and big changes were happening as the brand become King.

25 years later and brand is still King and exploited ruthlessly through internet actions and social media. The ability to send a message round the world in seconds and link it to a product or service, brings at the same time globalism and accessibility to all, even the smallest producers.
But without a well thought out strategy and defined plan, targeted and measurable actions sharing a clear and strictly defined objective, most marketing campaigns will fail.

So, each and every digital marketing action needs to be part of a wider marketing campaign. And that campaign starts with the basics: market research, brand proposition, SWOT, consumer analysis, channel selection and most importantly definition of specific, achievable, measurable objectives.

Even if a post benefits from a great SEO, is seen by 500,000 people, if only one of them is within our specific target the purpose of that post is not justified. Brand awareness is paramount in the marketing mix but only if it is within our target. What’s the point of animating the best well known high street hamburger chain outlets if our target are vegan consumers? Obvious, you say? I do agree. Let’s then be very thorough with the definition (and the SMARTness) of our objectives!