Building an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

Miklos Sarvary: Digital marketing, in the end, is about getting and growing customers. There’s a whole ecosystem dedicated growing customers that includes the media industry, AI, data analytics, retail advertising, and MarTech. Having an effective digital marketing strategy isn’t only knowing advertising technologies but also creativity.

No matter what else happens in digital marketing, it's obviously going to change drastically in the future. Making digital experiences that are engaging and unique is very important. New tools will always be introduced. Now we have generative AI. If everybody uses the same tool in the same way, it may be cheaper but it may not be effective. So, how do you stand out from the crowd? That’s where digital marketing strategy comes in.

In our Digital Marketing Strategy executive education program, we connect two key concepts. One is customer management, which is a long-term concept. We connect this strategic concept with communication tactics, which is how to get response from different types of customers. The second key concept is the breadth of how we talk about digital marketing. We are going to talk about the whole ecosystem of digital marketing – the media industry, AI and analytics, retail advertising, MarTech, and creativity. This program focuses more on the integration of the tools than the usage of the tools. It’s not how to get the Google interface right, but rather where does Google fit into an overall digital marketing strategy.

Kinshuk Jerath: Digital marketing changes very fast at a superficial level, exactly what tools to use. Three years ago, nobody was using TikTok in their marketing. Now, everybody wants to use it. There was a similar situation with connected TV. Now, these changes in tools are going to come up more and more. In the last 20 years, 20 percent of all ad spend was digital. Now it’s more than 70 percent. While digital marketing tools change a lot, in our executive education program, we've distilled things to the very fundamentals that will not change over time. No matter what new tools, websites, and offerings come up, you can always go back to these concepts and make an effective strategy.

Miklos Sarvary: We give you a pattern, a template to use. As new tools or new hot media emerges, you can plug them into this framework which, we believe, is going to be quite standard and timely. It allows participants to develop a very consistent and coherent, impactful digital marketing strategy.

Kinshuk Jerath: There are three distinct phases to get and grow customers – Acquisition, Retention, and Development. Digital marketing tools and strategies are the driving force behind progress at each of those stages. Right now in the industry, everybody’s thinking about things like CLV, customer lifetime value. In our program, we’re going to show the frameworks and tools to effectively. 

We’ll also spend time on ROI, return on investment, a key tool used by advertisers to see how their marketing is going. We’ll provide guidance on better ways to think about it as well as the pitfalls to avoid when using it.

Kinshuk Jerath: I co-authored a paper for the Journal of Marketing titled “Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets” that dives deep into several pitfalls marketers should be aware of in order to avoid digital inefficiencies. One of the pitfalls we address in our program is how do you measure the return on investment for advertising? While this seems like a simple question, and everybody thinks they can do it, it is a multifaceted issue that traps many marketing professionals. The fact that you can measure something does not mean that you should be doing more of it.

Kinshuk Jerath: Miklos runs the Media and Technology Program at Columbia Business School. Marketing and digital marketing specifically is all about using media for persuasion. Miklos is one of the most prominent media scholars in the world on this topic. He’s done lots of research, consulted with industry practitioners like IBM, INTEL, Samsung, Pearson, and PwC, and written a few books. He expertly showcases digital marketing strategy in the real-world in a fresh, modern way.

Miklos Sarvary: Kinshuk was very nice to tell you that I am the expert, but he’s really the expert. He was one of the experts used in the very prominent antitrust lawsuit between Google and the US government. He knows a lot about digital strategies and has consulted with many Fortune 500 companies as well as sitting on the advisory boards of several startups. One of the important things that Kinshuk brings to the table on top of digital marketing is retail expertise. A lot of digital marketing has now moved to the retail space and is done within the retail platforms. It cannot be done independently. And that's one aspect of the program that we're going to highlight.

Miklos Sarvary: C-suite level executives the chief marketing officer, VP of marketing, chief customer officer or chief strategy officer, strategy officers, brand managers, product managers, and growth hacking teams are a natural fit. Even chief technology officers, the people who are trying to leverage the data that exists, would find this beneficial. There’s often a tremendous amount of transaction data that can be effectively used for sales and marketing. Oftentimes it's the technology officer who’s the gatekeeper, the one driving the project. Every day there is so many new types of software coming up that a CTO has to decide what marketing tech stack should be used and how that MarTech should be managed. Should the organization go with one big solution like Salesforce or Adobe Suite or should they go with multiple smaller, specialized tech? Really, anybody who's looking to grow their customer base or is in charge of spending large budgets on digital marketing would gain value from this program.

This program is a balance of analytics, creativity, and strategy. By the end of the program, participants will get a higher level understanding of how to build a profitable customer base, learn how to integrate the different digital marketing techniques, how to focus on growth, and how to effectively allocate budgets.

Miklos Sarvary and Kinshuk Jerath are the co-faculty directors of the Digital Marketing Strategy executive education program.