Digital marketing is a highly misunderstood channel by entrepreneurs, traditional marketers, and high-level executives, since many of them think of the marketing channel as being separate from brand marketing, but it is not. Digital marketing should be seen as a channel that works to help market a company brand, just as television, radio and print markets the brand, but has the additional benefit of building customer community, along with real-time interactivity.
Digital marketing campaigns help to build company brand, although it uses traditional direct marketing messaging in its advertising to encourage click-through of traffic to sites for customer acquisition. For customer retention programs, brand marketing campaigns should utilize digital marketing channels to foster the building of the customer community, while promoting new products and cross-selling, which creates a halo effect onto the brand. Let's take Pepsi's brand marketing campaign this year, as an example.
Brand Video Ad Launched on Social Media Channels First
Pepsi created a brand marketing campaign that featured Kendall Jenner in a video advertisement, which was released on YouTube and other social media channels to reach its target audience. The video ad was highly successful and shared millions of times by online users. This is how a brand campaign should use a digital channel to create an experience with the customer base.
Unfortunately, the Pepsi video and the messaging was seen as negative for its inauthenticity, and caused a backlash to Pepsi's brand, due to customers feeling that the company was trying to capitalize on a sensitive cultural shift in the community to sell products. Suggestion to all companies, before releasing brand marketing videos into social media, make sure that the advertisement truly speaks to what the company believes in, not just for marketing products. 😉