Analog marketing has not disappeared, but its time is over. The Stone Age also ended, although houses made of stones still stand. The analog advertising market has exhausted itself at the level of ideas and meanings. Seriously, the most noticeable innovation in the same outdoor advertising for an outside observer now looks something like this:
The razor came out of the billboard so as not to give us any additional information. Or let’s take LED advertising displays – why make a screen on the street at a time when everyone has a personal screen in their hands, where you can display targeted advertising, and also get accurate feedback on it.
Of course, analog advertising can be integrated into digital, like a smart billboard that selects ads depending on the brand of the car approaching it. But this does not cancel the general trend, and such analog advertising is inseparable from e-marketing tools. Analog marketing, on the other hand, has reached its limits, and its market is highly regulated and divided among large companies.
Everything is new, cool and ultra-effective now in digital marketing and advertising – I was convinced of this while working with OLX, Prom, and Bodo. The activities of such companies, in principle, would be impossible without digital marketing, since communication with customers and logistics are initially online.
Not only marketplaces and ads are moving to digital, but also manufacturers. If a person can buy a BMW, then he also has a smartphone, and what is a smartphone if not endless advertising space. In general, it is easier to reach a large customer in the digital marketing market, since this market has appeared recently, and the demand for such services is high, which opens up great opportunities for new agencies.
During my work at the newage. agency, I have developed my understanding of digital marketing and digital advertising as complimentary terms. First, let’s talk about digital advertising – this is a huge number of tools, platforms, and formats that are updated every month or even more often. At the same time, the main thing that distinguishes digital from analog advertising tools is:
- the ability to personalize to communicate with the user using targeting;
- advertising that can be measured with technometric tools (to track whether there was a technical impression, whether the addressee saw it from the side, and ideally, to track the user’s further actions).
Digital provides a huge opportunity to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns – to connect not only with the audience at the level of age or social group but practically with individuals, offering services and products that suit them. We can also verify and reproduce the result. In this sense, analog differs from digital in the same way that astrology differs from astrophysics.
To analyze such a volume of accurate data in the context of a real advertising campaign, we have developed our Comprehensive Analysis methodology. It is based on the analysis of behavior patterns characteristic of the user after contact with advertising. Even if he did not click on it, but simply saw it. We used this tool on campaigns and saw that such an analysis allows you to determine how the user reacts to ads online and optimize targeting and campaign settings for this.
To do this, it was enough to correlate the data in an obvious way. I don’t know why no one thought of it before us, although the solution is literally on the surface.
This is one of the tools, but digital advertising includes a huge number of other tools and platforms that we come into contact with daily:
- advertising on websites and applications;
- advertising on smart TV;
- digital boards;
- online radio, online television;
- messages or push-s on the phone;
- advertising when connected to WiFi;
- advertising in the pos-terminal and others.
In addition, we have a huge number of tools in each item, it can be video, text, sound, or picture. Therefore, digital marketing is the marketing that is based on the use of digital tools.
The Distinctive Features of Ukrainian Digital Marketing
In Ukraine, everything is not so bad with the digital market. In our country, new platforms are not invented, but they come to us rather quickly. Sometimes we run in individual tools. For example, our citizens were among the first to actively use and build technologies for displaying ads when connected to public WiFi. In general, they often use our relatively unoccupied market as a testing ground; and a couple of companies from it have already quite successfully entered the world markets.
If you look at the huge segment of advertising on the Internet, then we do not lag. New tools and formats in online advertising are not launched on our market immediately, but if you have the expertise and desire, it is easy to get tools in Ukraine. Learn to use it, get certified, and work.
Let me explain with our example. More than 3-4 years ago, Google had advanced Internet marketing tools like the GMP (Google Marketing Platform). Our company was one of the first in Ukraine to receive certification for it, and for more than two years we have been offering this to advertisers from Ukraine.
It’s more a matter of desire than ability. Yes, the world giants do not run to us and do not stick to their technologies, but our specialists are very strong and go to those markets themselves, gaining expertise there and serving international clients. So our advertisers quickly get these tools and expertise. By the way, with such experience, our specialists are highly valued in Western (and not only) markets.
There Are No Universal Tools In Digital Marketing
But there are a huge number of tools and formats, and each of them is optimal for its tasks, they simply would not come up with non-optimal ones. Here I will analyze the user’s customer journey in detail.
Imagine that he has already decided on the product, but is looking for where it is cheaper. Search campaigns are perfect here since there are paid and free results, with text and with a picture or only with text. If a person, after visiting your site or application, was interested in some service or service, then with the help of such a tool you can “catch up” with him and return him to your site.
At the next stage, the user decides that he needs a laptop, but has not yet decided which one. You can target him by intent and help him decide. Here both video and banners can already come up.
We may also have a goal to raise brand awareness so that at the moment when a person needs this product (perhaps your advertising will form his need), he will remember you. Again, this can be done through a video or banner and in any medium.
Most importantly, for each stage, we use both different formats or targetings and apply different advertising campaigns using suitable tracking methods.
I will say with all confidence that the advertising buying patterns in digital media are a very big driver for the industry, and that this is not unique to digital media. On the Internet, you can arrange an online auction and thus get the maximum price for possible contact with a potential client, which advertisers will determine among themselves, but the contact will go to the one who is willing to pay more.
This is a very powerful tool that not only allows you to increase the cost of contact through competition (which is important for the media) but also makes the advertiser go deeper, analyze and be able to predict whether this user is worth paying such a high price for. This is cool because it develops tools for analyzing and predicting the result, which is why most digital advertising flies like a rocket, forcing us to come up with more and more complex tools for advertising, analysis, and predicting the result.
Digital advertising is facing even more new challenges, to which it will respond with even more innovation than it is now. The MarTech industry will develop by leaps and bounds. At the same time, it should still be taken into account that tools and platforms that require huge investments are unlikely to appear in Ukraine very shortly since in our market a contact costs several times, or even tens of times cheaper than in countries where there is more competition between advertisers and the final client is more expensive for the advertiser.
But we can be sure that the expertise of our Ukrainian companies, as well as the IT industry, will be in great demand among Western advertisers. We have strong cases, and we complement them together with Western clients – there are agencies in Ukraine that work only for Western clients.
An example of successful digital marketing implementation in Ukraine
Project Rocket, a food delivery service, is now the market leader and is fighting for the top spot. At the same time, the project from the start used only digital marketing, with almost no offline tools. This advertiser is a client of ours and I can assure you that they have used and continue to use the most innovative methods of placement, analytics, and forecasting.
Read about the Rocket promotion in the case study “Rocket delivery service: how to attract more customers with digital marketing optimization”.
Entire giants have also managed to grow digitally – these are Rozetka, OLX, and Prom there are a lot of such projects. I believe that e-commerce projects should first and foremost use digital promotion channels.
Simply because not all consumers of offline media can use your digital product, which means that your target audience is probably more limited than the potential number of products and services that you can find.
Bottom line – I am convinced that all media will soon be digitized, personalized marketing will win, as will Real-Time Bidding (an auction model for buying a contact), and analyzing the effectiveness of each contact will be an important multiplier that will strengthen the first two points.
