If you’re the manager of a football team, you want to score as many goals as possible on the one hand and avoid your opponent to score goals on the other. As a digital marketer, your job isn’t that much different. You want to acquire new customers on the one hand and to avoid that your current customers are running away to your competitors on the other. In order to be successful, both the football manager and the digital marketer use several tools or players. Let’s have a look at the similarities:
The Goalkeeper
As a digital marketer, branded paid search is your goalkeeper. He won’t score any goals or bring you any new customers, but he’ll try to do everything to avoid your opponent to score or to let your customers run away to your competitors.
Defense
Like your goalkeeper, it won’t be your defence that’ll send you a lot of traffic that has never visited your website before. Please welcome vouchercodes, cashback, daily deals and other discount driven partners that’ll help you to convince your (potential) customers to stay / buy with you.
Midfield
Your midfield contains your most all-round players. They can be important in scoring goals, but they also help you to avoid your opponent to score. Facebook Advertising is your absolute star; a box to box player that sends you tons of new customers, but also allows you to retarget your existing customers and people that have visited your website before. Other midfield players can be comparison websites and generic paid search.
Forward
If you don’t score, you can’t win and if you don’t acquire new customers, you’re not very likely to grow your business. Therefore, you need to have very good forward players in your team. Influencers that can help you find entire new audiences to target; bloggers that create high quality content around your brand that can inspire people. And like any team, you have this brilliant wing player that everybody loves and cost a lot of money, but of which you may have serious doubt about its effectiveness; exactly like display advertising indeed!
Salaries vs. attribution
Like a football manager, you don’t pay all your players equally. Taken into account that all offline marketing channels are forward players as well, most of your budget is being spent there. In the end, Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar receive the highest salaries as well. However, if you ignore the rest of the team, your customers will run away to your competitors before you even realise it. On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to invest the biggest chunk of your digital marketing budget in a goalkeeper and a solid defense, nobody does; this would be a strategy mainly based on fear, resulting in many boring 0-0 draws and the fans demanding you to resign….