What is digital marketing?

Understanding from a Motorsport perspective what are the main areas of the digital marketing landscape

It may seem like a trivial question but the more we deal with clients on this topic the more we understand there is a huge confusion on what digital marketing is.  You may find loads of material on-line to answer this question but probably we can attempt to give a more precise and relevant answer for our Motorsport Audience. We are the only worldwide company to be both recognised by both official Motorsport and Marketing bodies.

We are in fact member of the MIA (Motorsport Industry Association)

At the same time member of the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing)

First of all, I would like to ask you, if you use for work purposes the following tools:

• Newsletter
• Social Media
• E-commerce
• Website

As the answer is going to definitely be yes, we can assume you use daily digital marketing tools and strategies. Hopefully, by the end of this reading you will be more aware of the potential of these tools.

Now if we have established that most of us are currently managing Digital Marketing strategies, let us understand what is the magnitude of this phenomenon:

Also important to note that Digital Marketing is not:

SOCIAL MEDIA

In other words social media is a branch of digital marketing. What are the other branches:

• Forum
• Network
• Adwords
• Adsense
• Newsletter
• Blog
• SEO
• Website
• Links
• E-commerce

Etc etc, as this lsit get updated very often it would be presemptuous to be able to lsit them all. These are forsure the most common categories and we believe get updated relative fast by the invention of new technology/communication system.

Digital marketign is therefore the use of traditional marketing strategies to on-line media. What does this means for us? It means that Digital marketing have three main charateristics:

1.Manage complex customer relationships across a variety of digital channels.

We can send our messages with a variety of different tools and these messages can be complexed. We therefore are able to build customer relationship that are rich and complex. We know more about our clients and we can communicate with them in a more customised and hopefully relevant way.

2.Respond to and initiate dynamic customer interactions.

The main limit of traditional marketign is tha our audience is mainly passive. With digital marketign we can build a bi-directional communication where the other party can answer but most importantly steer where they can get most out of the relationship with a brand.

3.Extract value from big data to make better decisions faster.

Everything in Digital is traceable, everything can be measured and everything can be anaylised. This is a major opportunity as with traditional marketing is was difficult to undeerstand the ROI on promotional investements. WIth Digital not only is easier to calculate but can be done mostly live.

Digital marketing therefore is nothing new, is just using better tools and strategies.  One thng for sure is changed: as accessing these tools is very easy we have seen a larger amount of so called “professional” claiming to know all the secrets of new tools, being these social, newsletter, SEO, etc etc. It may well be that an in depth IT knowledge of the tool can be an advantage bu the real difference is made out by the whole marketing strategy. To succed in Digital it is required the same knowlede that was required in traditional marketing. This starts with an in depth knowledge of your clients and only you can provide this fundemental asset to start a good Digital marketing strategy.