I just read an article about digital marketing and one of the things that it said was that digital is the “most measurable medium ever” and then it went on to talk about the ROI of digital. This got me to thinking. If this is true (I believe that it is) then why the resistance to dive into the digital marketing channels? Ok, that’s rhetorical, I mean, if digital is the most measurable why are people willing to forgo digital to continue using traditional channels? We all know it is very, very difficult if not impossible to measure (with much certainty) the results from traditional channels.
Oh, sure, you can put a coupon in your print ads and hope that your salespeople collect them all so that you will know the sales that can be attributed to the coupon. Or, my favorite, you can ask all of your customers how they heard about you (remember, they will forget). But to know, exactly, the ROI of your traditional marketing, in the words of Donnie Brasco: “fuhgeddaboutdit”.
Could it be a double standard? Because we can measure everything digitally, the ROI expectation is really really high. And, because we can’t measure the ROI of traditional (well, not very easily) the expectation isn’t very high?
