Growing into Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

The DMI 3i Methodology for digital marketing

What’s the best way to achieve your digital marketing goals? The key thing is to monitor performance, and adjust your strategy as necessary, based on the performance. Listen to the data, and be flexible in your approach. This is known as the ‘test and grow’ approach.

It comprises three principles:

• Set your objective.
• Define your audience and channels.
• Launch and test.

Once you know your objective, you can define the audience and channels that will enable you to achieve your objective. After you launch, you can then test, monitor, and analyze to see if you have in fact met your objective.

Note: Bear in mind that it’s important to run rigorous, statistically significant tests here. Always begin with a clear hypothesis, and use large enough sample sizes to test the hypotheses. Check the validity of your data, and don’t be swayed by previous expectations or biases.

Example: Drunk Elephant

The skincare brand Drunk Elephant adheres to the DMI 3i Methodology (Initiate, Iterate, Integrate) in its digital marketing campaigns.

• It initiates by conducting market research. Drunk Elephant is notable for the lengthy and open communications it has with customers on Instagram, for example.
• It iterates by optimizing campaigns based on data analysis. This builds trust with the audience, as they see that their feedback is taken on board and turned into more effective messaging that reflects their needs.
• And it integrates by combining different digital channels such as social media, email marketing, and content marketing for a cohesive online presence. Authenticity is central to the brand’s appeal. Instead of buying celebrity endorsement, it prefers to let customers promote the brand with their honest reviews.

Applying the methodology

Using the test and grow approach – and setting objectives and testing performance – is central to the running of a successful digital marketing strategy.

Set your objective

Many business objectives can be achieved with digital marketing, including ecommerce sales, lead generation, brand building, and creating awareness. When planning your strategy, you should decide what is the priority for your business and create a campaign that will help achieve this. Starting with your objectives allows you to then define the audience you want to target on the channels this audience uses.

Define your audience and channels

When you have set your objective, you can use customer research to help identify the characteristics of those most likely to buy your product or use your service.

It’s important to learn to understand how your customer would like to be talked to, so you can reflect this in the messaging. To learn more about your customers, you can use:

• Ongoing consumer research
• Past data collected from your campaigns
• Dedicated research created specifically for your company

When researching audience characteristics, make sure you note the channels that they use, as you’ll want to focus your resources on the channels that your audience uses in a way that can help you achieve your objective. There’s no point wasting budget on channels that your target audience doesn’t use!

Bear in mind, however, that you don’t have to include every channel your audience uses. That would simply cost too much money and time. Instead, if sales is your goal, for example, focus on the different channels that your audience uses most often to buy. On the other hand, if building awareness is your goal, focus on the channels your audience uses most often to find out about a product. By starting with the customer and translating the customer view and insights into a tangible digital strategy, you increase your chance of achieving your goals.

Launch and test

In order to be efficient with your production costs and media spend and resources, when launching a new strategy or campaign it’s best to begin with a test budget. This can help ensure that you don’t overspend. For example, you might run a number of Facebook Ads on a low budget to test and see how they perform for a few days or weeks. If your results are positive and you’re getting a good return for your campaign in terms of your objective, you can decide to make more creative options for the ads, increase the media spend, or both.

If you keep your objective in mind when building your audience and choosing your channels, you are setting up your strategy with a purpose. Then, when you evaluate your strategy performance against your objective, you can decide to increase or decrease spend and resources allocation to the strategy to deliver more on your objective or pull back if it’s not performing as expected. This allows you to grow into your digital strategy in an efficient way.

Bear in mind that it’s very important to create a hypothesis before launching into tests. You can run tests quickly and cheaply on Google, Meta, and Mailchimp today. This problem is that this means it’s also easier than ever to run meaningless tests. Ensure that:

• You have a significant, randomized sample.
• You are trying to answer an important business or marketing question.
• You act on the findings of the test. For example, you can scale what works and learn from what doesn’t.

Many advertising platforms now have inbuilt A/B testing tools. It is very easy to run these tests in Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook. But remember, you must test the right things!