{"id":117062,"date":"2012-01-06T19:36:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-07T00:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/the-great-digital-marketing-divide-bridging-clicks-bricks\/"},"modified":"2024-12-19T16:39:45","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:39:45","slug":"the-great-digital-marketing-divide-bridging-clicks-bricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-ca\/insights\/blog\/strategy\/the-great-digital-marketing-divide-bridging-clicks-bricks\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Digital Marketing Divide: Bridging Clicks & Bricks"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first installment of a multi-part blog series on the growing gap between online marketing efforts measured through online transactions and online marketing measured through offline behaviors.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s easy to understand why marketers love online marketing. It’s just so measurable. I spent years in print and broadcast media, and demonstrating return in those channels requires no small measure of smoke and mirrors. But with the Internet, you can track everything to a certainty, right? For some campaigns and categories, that’s almost true. But for the majority of online marketing efforts today, understanding success and return is just as hard (and maybe harder) than offline marketing campaigns. The main reason is that, today more than ever, online marketing is driving offline sales. This continuing trend has created the phenomenon we’re calling The Great Digital Marketing Divide.<\/p>\n

Traditional online marketing<\/h2>\n

While we’re coining terms, let’s throw out one that seems completely\u00a0counter-intuitive: traditional online marketing. This, put simply, refers to online marketing that drives primarily to online sales channels. These are largely e-commerce concerns like Amazon or eBay where it’s easy to see where site visits came from, what sources drove online conversions, and precisely how much revenue and profit came in as a result. Marketers who cut their teeth in this environment tend to see online marketing as a completely measurable, highly linear exercise. You do this and you get that, so you always know what to do and when to change. This is the analytical marketers dream. Of course, it’s never that cut and dry, but with e-commerce or other wholly online conversion paths, it’s just about as neat and tidy as you can get.<\/p>\n

It’s not controversial to say that online marketing has undergone some significant shifts over the last decade or so, but perhaps the greatest shift is the effectiveness of online marketing in driving offline behaviors and conversions. Much of this is happening at the local level. Ads can be targeted at the local level through IP addresses and GPS locations in the mobile environment. Local search<\/a> channels like Google Places have turned the Internet into a living, breathing local business directory<\/a>. This is good news and bad news for those who do business in the offline world.<\/p>\n

Zero Moment of Truth<\/h2>\n
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