Dr. Rick Franza, Dean of the Hull College of Business, discusses a different, timely business topic each Monday in this column. This week, he talks about the importance of digital marketing. The interview has been edited for clarity and impact.
ABD: We hear a lot about digital marketing, but I think for many companies that is still a somewhat vague and confusing term. What is digital marketing and how does it differ from traditional marketing?
Rick: Marketing is any way of providing your message and can be done through various media. Advertising is specifically talking about your products and services; marketing is more general and broader. It includes advertising but also includes things like identifying who your customers are and identifying what their needs are.
Traditional marketing has been print, radio, and TV. Digital is primarily anything done through the internet. It can all be done through electronic devices like computers, tablets, and phones. Digital advertising is how you use those various devices to promote your product and company. But digital marketing also includes data collection of customers, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), e-commerce, collecting and analyzing data, using social media, and direct email marketing.
ABD: Often, it seems that companies are satisfied with just having a website. What more should they be doing?
Rick: A website is certainly part of your arsenal, but if you think that just a website is sufficient is where you’ll have a problem. You have to drive traffic to your website, and you can use traditional marketing to do that or with QR codes. But you need a richer portfolio of tools.
With analytics, you either have to have someone on staff to gather them or buy the information. If you’re advertising online or using social media or email marketing, the analytics are available, but typically you have to pay for it. There are also companies that will work with you to get you to the top of the search engines. Some things require more time than money, like social media.
You don’t want to just do things to do things – you want to understand how you get customers.
ABD: What role does social media play in digital marketing?
Rick: You can use social media in a couple of different ways, by posting yourself or hiring social media influencers – people paid to promote your company. You also have what is called “earned media,” which is stories or information about you that you didn’t pay for.
But it’s important to know what social media your customers use: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. You don’t want to just post on the social media you use, but on the ones most of your customers use. If you’re willing to grind it out and post yourself, social media can be very inexpensive.
ABD: A lot of companies now offer apps you can download onto your phone. How big does a company need to be to offer an app?
Rick: Not big at all. Having your own app can be very helpful. It builds brand loyalty, which is critically important. Obviously, the more bells and whistles an app has, the more expensive it gets. But there are a lot of young folks out there developing apps.
ABD: Digital marketing seems to cut response time for helping customers, especially with problems.
Rick: You can get a lot of free mileage out of that. It also allows you to change marketing plans on a dime. When I was young, I delivered newspapers and we got the preprinted ads to insert into the Sunday edition on the Tuesday or Wednesday before. But with digital marketing, you’re not stuck on Sunday with what you developed days or weeks before.
ABD: From what you’ve said, it sounds like digital marketing should be a part of every business, large or small.
Rick: It’s essential. You can’t be one-dimensional. If you have no digital footprint, you probably will be in trouble because your market will age out eventually. Word of mouth can do a certain amount of driving business, but if you want to reach a wider market, digital is the way to go. When we redid the undergraduate concentrations at the business school, we made marketing more specific to digital marketing because that’s where more of the marketing spend is going.
