TL;DR
- Digital marketing is both creative and quantitative
- Digital content creates and boosts authentic user experiences
- Digital marketing is rooted in content marketing with surprising history
I’m a digital marketer—digital marketing is my trade but writing is my craft. (Yes, I over-edit my WhatsApp messages and other throwaway text 🤦♀️.) I get to stay at home all day for the purpose of developing and executing great digital strategies. How cool is that?
Let’s explore five things that I love most about digital marketing.
1. Digital marketing creates user experiences
The best digital marketing doesn’t even feel like a marketing experience. Have you ever been excited by a unique contest or giveaway from your favorite brand? What’s the last website—or YouTube video or webinar—that you consumed for hours because it was so beneficial to you? For me, it was probably some great piece of content about SEO or the way that AI is impacting digital marketing.
Exceptional digital content drives authentic user experiences. Why? Because great digital content is—
- Accessible: Great content is easy to start consuming, easy to keep consuming, and doesn’t ever drag. Even subject matter novices should be able to understand—and enjoy!—your highly accessible marketing content.
- Informative: The best digital content teaches you something new, whether that’s a neat anecdote, an intriguing fact, or a broad philosophical concept that changes your entire worldview. All in a day’s work for great digital marketing.
- Engaging: Are you enjoying reading this blog so far? I sincerely hope so. Highly engaging content feels like it was created for you and only you, or tells a story in a way that’s sure to draw you in.
- Current: Nobody likes to consume stale bread—same goes for old content. Great digital content is fresh, or constantly being refreshed. (Pro tip: Content recycling is your friend!)
With so many ways to approach digital marketing, your most important question to ask is what types of digital experiences you want your target audience to have. Then you can craft digital strategies that create and enhance those experiences.
2. Digital marketing creates value
I enjoy planning, producing, and optimizing digital marketing strategies because I know that it creates lasting value in the form of a positive return on investment (ROI). Digital strategies are like tropical fruit trees—they take time to bear but ultimately yield in abundance for many years.
But how much value does digital marketing really create? The short answer is it depends, and the long answer is it depends on several factors including—
- Digital marketing format: Different types of digital marketing—like blogs, webinars, and social media—produce different ROIs across different time horizons.
- Digital content visibility: Optimizing digital content for Google search and distributing it to all the relevant channels are both imperative actions for generating maximum value from your digital marketing.
- Digital marketing optimization: Digital marketing initiatives can continue to produce value over time if they are updated and optimized regularly.
- Key business metrics: The monetary value of a digital marketing strategy is also impacted by important business metrics—including the lead conversion rate of the sales team and the average per-customer revenue generated by the service or product.
- Buyer journey: Customers with long buyer journeys likely need to engage with a brand on several channels or consume multiple pieces of digital content before becoming ready to purchase. Products with long buyer journeys generally require the most digital marketing.
- Cost of production: The ROI produced by any digital marketing strategy accounts for the cost of creating and executing the strategy. Many marketing teams choose to hire contract-based content writers to minimize costs of production.
If you like formulas, then you’ll love that digital marketers can use an ROI equation—with many variables!—to determine the value generated by a single digital asset. What’s qualitatively clear is that digital marketing creates an abundance of value, usually over time. Sometimes the full extent of that value can be challenging to measure.
3. Content marketing has some surprising history
You may think that digital marketing is new, but it’s preceded by content marketing—which has a surprisingly long history. As a digital marketer with deep expertise in content marketing, I’m delighted to tap into the roots of this profession.
Let’s take a look at some of the early success stories in content marketing—
- Old Farmer’s Almanac: Ben Franklin’s famous agricultural almanac, first known as Poor Richard’s Almanack, was launched by the inventor and entrepreneur in 1732 as a content marketing strategy. The popularity of the almanac spurred substantial growth in Franklin’s newspaper and paper mill businesses.
- The Furrow: The tractor company John Deere was another early content marketer, starting a farming-focused magazine in 1895 called The Furrow. The goal of The Furrow is “to tell stories that people enjoy reading.” Like the Old Farmer’s Almanac, The Furrow is still published today.
- The Guiding Light: Ever wonder why soap operas are named as such? That’s because these juicy daytime dramas were originally sponsored by soap companies, with storylines meant to captivate soap-buying moms. Procter & Gamble began sponsoring The Guiding Light on radio in 1937, and moved the series to television in 1952.
Print advertisers in the 1950s and 1960s began using content marketing strategies to tell visual stories. Brands like Coca-Cola and Marlboro were among the first to use memorable campaign images to create lasting emotional connections with their audiences.
4. Digital marketing strategy is hard
Another major reason why I love digital marketing is because it uses both sides of my brain. My left brain is going to break that down into two lists for you, and the right side of my brain will fill in the interesting details—
Just kidding. Producing and executing great digital strategies requires creativity, and digital marketers must quantitatively prove their value. Digital marketing strategy is hard because opportunity cost is real—an organization typically cannot pursue every digital marketing tactic all at once. Digital marketing strategy gets a lot easier once you learn to prioritize your organization’s key business needs.
Like checklists? Here’s a handy cheat sheet to determine which digital marketing metric to prioritize based on your business or campaign objective—
| Business Goal | Content Marketing Metric(s) |
|---|---|
| Brand awareness | Website traffic |
| Revenue growth | Lead generation rate |
| Community engagement | Social media likes, comments, shares |
5. Content creation is a worthy craft—and pretty fun
I’ve identified as a writer since about age 16. I love digital marketing because it enables me to create many different types of content, and for a medium (the internet) that people actually use. My biggest secret to creating great content—I have a few!—is that I genuinely enjoy producing it. What’s fun to create is likely enjoyable to consume.
Writing itself also has a long history, to which I feel privileged to add. The earliest known writing dates back to around 3400 B.C.E. and emerged as a way for Sumerians—in the region that’s now the Persian Gulf—to account for business transactions. Writing has since evolved to serve many purposes, and new distribution channels such as paper, printing presses, and social media have made the written word ubiquitous and impossible to ignore. Writing has long been a powerful driver of disruption and social change, and could be considered as one of the earliest decentralized technologies.
I’m not sure if the pen is mightier than the sword, but its ROI is probably much better.
