Blog | Spoiler Alert! 5 Reasons why the terms the ‘Search’ ‘SEO’ and ‘Digital’ Marketing are going the way of the Dodo

At Organic Development, we talk to customers about doing ‘search marketing’, ‘social media’ and ‘digital marketing’ but perhaps we are doing our clients a disservice in this.

As far as I can see, the only REAL difference between digital channels and traditional channels is that digital channels tend to be more efficient, more measurable and have a growing audience in direct contradiction to the trends in the majority of traditional channels.

The reality is that what we call ‘digital’ is just another set of platforms for traditional marketing activity. There will be a gradual integration of offline and online service providers over the next five years and the idea of digital channels being in some way separate from offline channels will cease to have any relevance. You can already see this happening in nearly every agency on the globe integrating digital capability into their skills mix.

I would say that within a decade the idea of digital marketing or search marketing as a separate discipline to traditional marketing will have pretty much disappeared. Here are five reasons why:

Search marketing is a combination of other activities you probably already do (or should be doing): Search engines rankings are more to do with effective, quality engagement and activity online than anything else these days. As part of any SEO campaign we will always do a mix of the following.

1. PR
2. Social media / Word of mouth / networking
3. CRM
4. Content creation and distribution (link baiting)
5. Building a fast user friendly website

That doesn’t mean there is no place for an SEO expert or great technical knowledge, - the SEO expert of developer that works on your site is usually just tasked with bringing your site up to an acceptable standards of speed, coding, usability, navigability, relevant quality optimised content, meta and structural strategy and accessibility. Effectively around a third of all search marketing activity is just compensating for a lack of investment into your website.

As for the other two thirds, nearly all of the off-site activity carried out under the banner of SEO or search marketing is some form of PR, content distribution, social media or word of mouth. These aren’t separate disciplines – they are marketing activities you should be doing anyway.

1. Digital advertising channels mimic offline channels: The majority of media buying and advertising online that you get as part of a standard digital campaign is display advertising in the form of banners. This is often presented as targeted on demand advertising, but is it really. The truth is nearly all display ad networks are hardly more targeted than your traditional press and media campaigns and can be characterized as interruption advertising alongside consumable content. Online display advertising is the final recourse of the desperate media owner who is losing money from their offline media channels –the channel may be digital but the business model and consumer experience is essentially the same.
2. Traditional channels are being digitised across the board: I can’t think of one offline channel that isn’t being digitised. Direct mail became email, TV went digital, Newspapers are going that way and even outdoor is a long way down that path – just look at the awesome digital opportunities offered by Ocean Outdoor.
3. Augmented reality is the first stage in a process that will completely remove the line between digital and offline channels: When digital messages are applied to the real world environment in the form of some kind of enhancement of the offline world, is this really digital marketing at all? As more digital advertising, conversation and information is associated with or overlaid onto the really world, it becomes hard to tell where digital stops and traditional starts.
4. Integrated campaigns are nearly ALWAYS the best performing campaigns: 9 times out of 10 you need a mix of media for an effective campaign. Experience has taught me that trying to use digital on its own, or replacing 100% of traditional spend with online spend doesn’t work. The customer lifecycle is too complex to try and reach, convert and retain all customers through a single channel. An integrated approach is the only effective approach.

As I have already stated, I don’t think this means there isn’t a place for digital agencies or traditional agencies. It just means that traditional marketing skills are best employed using a mix of offline and online channels, and that over time this will mean that the differentiation between the two will become more and more irrelevant. At the moment three is still a place for terms such as digital marketing campaigns, search marketing and SEO – and there will always be a place for this kind of activity, However the only reason we use these terms is because that’s how consumers of marketing services and solutions understand and perceive the world at present. As our understanding of what digital is becomes deeper, these terms will cease to be useful – and then their future is sealed and they will go the way of the dodo.

So if digital and search cease to be useful terms, what will be? I think the informal marketing channels are probably the next big thing. Differentiating structured activity from unstructured content and engagement marketing will be the new growth area – and at some point that will probably integrate into the wider mix as well.