Integrating Digital Marketing Thought into Digital Strategy

Hello everyone and Happy 2013!  After a brief break from blogging and a two week respite from social media over the holidays, I have lots of new ideas to share and welcome your comments.  Today I want to talk about how Interactive technology has changed the basic way we look at the marketing strategy framework. Instead of just thinking about digital strategy at the end of the process, or as another chapter, as many marketing texts do now, should we not be thinking about completely revamping the process of marketing strategy formation?

For example, we know that B2C consumers and B2B customers start their purchase process online, most usually using a search engine. How many marketing strategy books begin with the importance of search engine marketing? “Conventional” marketing wisdom states that wants became needs and then purchases. Is it not it now true that needs become searches and the results of searches become wants, which lead to more searches and ultimately to purchases? (See above graph).

This interactive marketing approach to strategy means taking into account not only the customer process for finding information but also what the customer is searching for when they search. I recently did a consulting project for a small company and they told me what they were good at, what we would traditionally consider to be a ‘core competencies’ from a marketing point of view. Unfortunately, the search trends on Google Trends indicated that search trends for these products and services were declining. Following a traditional process of identifying core competencies would not take into account what is happening with the consumer online and how they are looking for information. Would you agree as one step in updating how we think about marketing strategy that we need to incorporate digital strategy earlier into the search process?

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.