Today, digital marketers are at a crossroads between brand building and driving business performance. Traditionally, marketers followed the marketing funnel, where customers start with brand awareness before eventually making a purchase. However, in today’s fast-paced digital landscape, digital marketers are expected to not only build brand awareness but also drive business performance, including sales and revenue. This evolution has expanded their roles beyond managing social media accounts, running email campaigns, and publishing content on websites. The demand for driving business performance has given rise to new sub-roles, such as growth marketing and performance marketing.
Digital marketers utilize multiple channels and strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) campaigns. With a plethora of tools and technologies available, such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, Appsflyer, and SEMrush, digital marketers can execute and measure their strategies efficiently and effectively.
This article delves into the multifaceted role of digital marketers, exploring how they navigate the dual responsibilities of brand building and driving business performance. It provides insights into how digital marketers can effectively balance these two critical aspects to achieve business success.
One of the primary responsibilities of a digital marketer is to enhance brand awareness and visibility. In any case, users wouldn’t use a product or service they are unaware of. Hence, digital marketers are expected to create and distribute valuable content that resonates with the target audience across many touchpoints. These touchpoints include social media, blogs, email, influencer partnership, blog content, display advertising etc. These channels can be used to build a strong online presence.
For instance, a brand building campaign may involve creating hundreds of blog posts, daily social media images, online videos highlighting the brand’s unique value proposition, digital interviews, weekly emails to users etc. These activities can be amplified via social media or awareness focused digital adverts to extend the brand’s reach.
To measure brand building, metrics such as reach, engagement, brand sentiment, impressions are used. Your brand building efforts are yielding results when you attain a high level of engagement and positive brand sentiment organically.
While building a strong brand lays the foundation for a successful digital presence, the goal of a digital marketer is to convert this brand awareness into tangible business results. This includes driving conversions, sales, and revenue, which are critical for the overall growth and performance of the business. The biggest advantage digital marketing has over traditional marketing is the ability to measure performance. This is why performance marketing is key – as you can implement strategies designed to achieve specific business objectives such as lead generation or sales.
The key digital marketing strategies to achieve business performance include pay-per-click advertising or cost-per-acquisition campaigns, search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, affiliate marketing, A/B testing, marketing analytics, customer journey mapping, etc. These strategies and tactics focus on driving business performance measured by metrics such as return on investment, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, life-time value, sales, and revenue etc.
Balancing Both Aspects to drive business growth
The most successful digital marketers integrate brand-building and performance-driven strategies holistically. This approach balances building brand awareness, visibility and engagement with driving tangible business performance.
For instance, a comprehensive digital marketing strategy will start with a brand awareness stage, attracting users to the company’s unique value proposition, before commencing a performance-driven phase, focusing on converting the engaged audience into paying customers.
To excel in both aspects, digital marketers are expected to have diverse skillset, including, storytelling, copywriting, content creation, social media management, performance tracking, SEO skills, campaign management, marketing automation, and reporting skills.
It must be stated that balancing brand building and business performance can be challenging for any digital marketer across any industry. It is especially more brutal in tech companies and startups expecting you to deliver business results immediately, while building the brand presence. At enterprise digital businesses, you may be expected to prove how your marketing efforts is contributing to the business performance. Both situations present opportunities for growth and innovation, depending on your experience and expertise.
A good way to manage the pressure of delivering immediate results is setting milestones for the company. Achieving each milestone will make the company trust your work and confirm if your strategies are working.
In conclusion, the role of a digital marketer extends beyond brand building to driving measurable business performance. Delivering tangible results through quantitative data will help you stand out in the digital ecosystem. As the digital business environment continues to evolve, your ability to balance brand building with driving business performance will be crucial to your success and the success of the businesses you work for.
About the writer: Oladayo Adeniyi is a Digital Marketer with extensive experience working in financial services, insurance, investment, Fintech, and telecommunications industry. He also lectures digital marketing in a Business School.
Oladayo is deeply involved in mentoring/training digital enthusiasts to join the tech ecosystem, having created a digital marketing course for Utiva and mentored students in Udacity’s partnership with Edo state tech scholarship programme.