What is the difference between Digital Marketing and Strategic Marketing?
Digital Marketing is the online arm of strategic marketing. It focuses on executing activities aimed at attracting website traffic and is often confused with advertising.
Typical digital marketing activities include: creating text content for a webpage; doing online advertising, for example with Google Ads; delivering email campaigns; implementing SEO processes, and the like.
All these activities have a strong link to advertising. But the real connection is the strategic reasoning behind them, rather than how they are executed.
Read also this about how to create strategies that deliver what they promise.
Strategic marketing is “The real thing”
Although there is nothing wrong with these activities, what makes strategic marketing “The real thing” is the fact that it is strategic in nature.
Strategic marketing is grounded in the creation and execution of strategies, and strategies use tactics to execute.
When the strategic, long-term view of a business is clear, it is easier to choose a coherent path to reach your goal. But if you do not know where you are going, chances are you will never get there.
For this reason, your brand does not need a specific “Digital” or “Online” Marketing Strategy. If you know how multinational companies that are serious about marketing manage brands, probably you already have a strategic plan including a marketing strategy, a copy strategy, and a media strategy. These are the only strategies you really need to execute online marketing activities that are coherent with the brand’s long-term objective.
Digital marketing is a channel and does not need a separate strategy
The online channel is, well, a communication channel, like TV, radio, print, and so on.
Companies that are serious about brand management do not follow different strategies on different communication channels. The copy strategy, for instance, does not vary between print and TV media. It is executed differently, but it does not change.
For this same reason, you do not need a digital marketing strategy.
Where does online marketing fit in the marketing world?
Don’t let them fool you with terms like online marketing, Internet marketing, digital marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and you name it. There are no such things. They do NOT exist. There is only one marketing and it is called Strategic Marketing. Granted, the digital world is a reality, but where does it fit in marketing?
Online marketing is confusing. The only real impact of the above meaningless terms is that they are helping marketing lose its identity.
Search for “types of marketing” in Google and you are blown up with garbage. When I tried it I got 523 million pages including “52 types of marketing strategies”, “131 different kinds of marketing”, “top 10 types of marketing”, “explore 159 types of marketing”, and counting. Then I tried with “types of online marketing” and I got over 15 million pages including “10 types of online marketing”, “14 types of online marketing”, “7 types of online marketing”, “5 types of online marketing”, “top 10 types of online marketing”, and so on.
Now, try this: Replace the word marketing with math, or archaeology, philosophy, economics, or any other discipline of your choice. Do those expressions still make sense? Not really, right? So, why does this happen with marketing?
Granted, the digital world is a reality, but where does it fit in marketing?
The Media strategy is the place where online marketing belongs.
Online marketing is just another medium where you communicate in accordance with the Copy strategy. Online marketing is an executive element and not a strategic one, like the Marketing Strategy, the Product Strategy, and so on.
Does the rise of online activities revolutionize marketing? No.
Does it require marketers to develop new skills? Sure, as has always been the case every time new channels were born. Think of the radio channel, TV, cinema, or modern billboards. Each evolution required marketers to develop new skills and learn how to do things they didn’t do before.
Yet, did these innovations change what marketing meant? No.
So, why should digital?
Don’t confuse tactics with strategy. Learn how to create strategies and forget all the nuances and catchy phrases made popular by people who have no clue about what strategic marketing is. Otherwise, you will lose the business game.