CHAPTER 1
Digital Marketing Strategy

By Greg Jarboe

It's no longer enough to simply claim expertise as a digital marketer. Employers and clients know that they are best served by marketers whose knowledge and skills are current and certified.

According to the 2019 OMCP Role Study, which asked more than 4,000 hiring managers about their digital marketing priorities, companies and agencies are no longer looking for one-trick ponies. Today, they require employees to have conceptual knowledge and skills across eight disciplines:

• Digital analytics
• Digital advertising (including price-per-click)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Conversion optimization (UX)
• Mobile marketing
• Email marketing

This book includes a chapter on each of these disciplines. So, whether you are one of the professionals preparing for the OMCA exam, or one of the students at more than 900 universities and training institutes that teach to OMCA standards worldwide, this official guide can help you get OMCA certification from OMCP, an industry association that maintains the competency and exam standards for digital marketing in coordination with industry leaders.

Is digital marketing certification worth it? Well, individuals who earn the OMCA certification

• stand out to employers and clients as having verified digital marketing skills, education, and experience,
• earn between 16 percent and 26 percent more than noncertified digital marketers, and
• operate more effectively as a marketing professional, sharing common language and generally accepted practices across multiple disciplines.

The 2019 OMCP Role Study also found that the industry's marketing leaders wanted the addition of digital marketing strategy as its own discipline. Although there are no OMCP competencies for digital marketing strategy yet, that's the challenge this chapter will tackle.

By the end of this chapter, you will have accomplished the following:

• Learned some of the lessons that other fast-moving consumer goods and consumer packaged goods brands have learned from the struggles of Kraft Heinz
• Discovered what other retail brands in the U.K. have observed just by watching the annual Christmas adverts created by John Lewis & Partners and Adam & Eve/DDB
• Will understand how to use the modern marketing model (M3) as a framework to develop an effective digital marketing strategy for your organization

You will also learn why creating an effective digital marketing strategy is a challenge. There are three key reasons:

• There is no "one-size-fits-all" way to build an audience.
• Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.
• Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

I'll tackle each one of these challenges in this chapter so that you can overcome them successfully.

There Is No "One-Size-Fits-All" Way to Build an Audience

Here's the first key reason why teaching digital marketing strategy is a challenge: In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill said, "There is no 'one-size-fits-all' way to build an audience." In the 21st century, digital marketers have discovered that there is no "one-size-fits-all" way to

• create brand awareness,
• build credibility/trust,
• educate audience(s),
• build loyalty with existing clients/customers,
• generate demand/leads,
• nurture subscribers/audience/leads,
• drive attendance to one or more in-person or virtual events,
• generate sales/revenue,
• support the launch of a new product, or
• build a subscribed audience.

These are all goals that B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) marketers have successfully achieved by using content marketing in the last 12 months, according to the "12th Annual Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2022" report produced by Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs. And content marketing is just one of the top eight disciplines of digital marketing.

So what is the best digital marketing strategy for successfully achieving these goals?

There isn't a simple answer to this frequently asked question. Why? Because your company is unique, your customers are unique, and your competitors are unique, too. So one size does not fit all.

Using AnswerThePublic to "listen into" autocomplete data from Google and other search engines, I recently discovered that people in Great Britain are asking about a "digital marketing strategy" for . a brand, a hotel, a product, a restaurant, a startup, airlines, app, automotive industry, B2B, B2C, banks, beauty salon, beginners, brand awareness, business, business growth, cafe, cement industry, charities, clothing brand, coaching institutes, coffee shop, colleges, construction company, consumer goods, cosmetics, dairy products, dentists, detergent, doctors, ecommerce, ecommerce website, edtech, educational institutes, event management, events, example crossword, example crossword clue, Facebook, fashion, fashion brands, financial services, FMCG, food products, furniture company, grocery, gym, healthcare, higher education, hospitals, hotels, HR, ice cream, Instagram, insurance companies, interior design, IT companies, jewelry brand, law firms, lead generation, local business, logistics companies, luxury brands, manufacturers, manufacturing industry, mobile app, movies, new brand, new business, new product launch, newspapers, NGO, nonprofit, online business, online store, organization, pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacy, photographers, political campaigns, preschool, product launch, professionals, radio stations, real estate, recruitment agency, resort, restaurants, SaaS, schools, service industry, small business, social media, software companies, startups, technology companies, tourism, travel agency, university, video, website, and wedding planners.

In other words, people are asking about more digital marketing strategies than there are unique pizza toppings!

Until OMCP can develop the digital marketing strategy standards for training providers and standardized testing, most of the co-authors and contributors to this book have been using illustrative case studies to provide marketing professionals and students with an up-close, in-depth, and detailed examination of a specific digital marketing strategy as well as its related contextual conditions.

Professors at Harvard Business School (HBS) have been using "the case method" since 1921. Central to the case method is the idea that students aren't provided the "answer" to the problem. Instead, the student is forced to analyze a situation and find solutions without full knowledge of all the facts. The case method has been the most widely applied and successful teaching instrument to come out of HBS, and it is used in hundreds of other top business schools around the world.

For example, a couple of years ago, I was a member of a team of subject matter experts who taught a bespoke (custom) digital marketing training program for marketers at a Fortune 500 company in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industries.

We selected case studies that offered relevant sets of circumstances. Why is this important? Because the typical case study may offer interesting information, but it often doesn't teach useful lessons to marketers in different fields.

Since the marketing team that we were training wanted to see case studies from other companies in their field, I shared a case study that analyzed the failure of a company in the FMCG and CPG industries.

With permission from Search Engine Journal, the next section contains a lightly edited version of what I wrote back on July 12, 2019, and shared during the bespoke digital marketing training program.

Kraft Heinz: Isn't Anyone Going to Help That Poor Brand?

According to Mark Ritson of Marketing Week, "Kraft Heinz is in 57 varieties of trouble," which is a real pity. The American food company formed in 2015 by the merger of Kraft Foods and H. J. Heinz is the fifth-largest food and beverage company in the world with 2018 net sales of approximately $26 billion.

Ritson, an award-winning marketing columnist, professor, and consultant in the United Kingdom, thinks Kraft Heinz is suffering from a number of self-inflicted wounds, from underinvestment in its brands to a failure to adapt its portfolio to modern tastes.

However, no company aims to inflict wounds on itself, so that explanation is too clever by half.

It reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles when Sheriff Bart takes himself hostage by pressing his gun against his own head, prompting Harriet Johnson to cry out, "Isn't anyone going to help that poor man?"

YouTube and Kraft Heinz: A Strategic Threat and Opportunity  Even though it may be too late, I'm going to help that poor brand. Again.

Yes, I've tried to help before.

Back in March 2015, I took a look at the combined Kraft Heinz Company's YouTube channels for Tubular...