What makes these tasty?

I have just been asked “what makes effective digital marketing?”

And I think the answer is the same as the answer to the question; “What is effective marketing?”

It depends on what objectives you are trying to acheive.

A further question might then be “Well okay, but how can I tell if its effective digital marketing?”

In this case I think a simple way to expose the objective achieving possibilities of digital is to break down the objectives into three measurable areas like this;

1. Coverage: who saw it where and in what numbers; Because awareness is frequently a factor and we are still addicted to numbers as a result of our junkie-like usage of broadcast media
2. Engagement: once exposed, what did they do with it; click on it, share it, embed it, comment on it, forward it in an email etc.; What is measured here is very tactically specific; a video on you tube will have different engagement metrics to a banner advert, a PPC advert or a search optimised landing page
3. Conversion: what business or marketing objective did it acheive in what numbers and at what cost; Often referred to as ROI, but if taken in isolation can lead to short term tactical activity that doesn’t grow the audience for the brand or their relationship with it

And then there is a bonus set of metrics if the activity results in user ratings, reviews or even online conversation around the activity;

4. Sentiment: what did those who were exposed, engaged or converted by the activity think of the activity, the brand, its products and services?; Clients are very familiar with this from services like Milward Brown’s brand tracking, the difference here is that it’s not a sample of those exposed and therefor doesn’t require mass exposure for the activity to make recruitment possible. Instead it’s taken from all of those who have been exposed to the activity and who have made their sentiment known online (allowing for varying degrees of accuracy in the level of NLP in whatever tool you are using to measure sentiment). You’d need an econometric statistician to explain the qualitative differences in those two sets of data; I’m just saying their different.