Digital marketing: no playbook for success, but still worthy to try!

Even though digital marketing is capturing a bigger and bigger portion of a company’s marketing spending and it’s becoming everyday more ROI effective, its biggest drawback is the lack of a defined “playbook for success”.

Recently I was reading an article in the New York Times regarding the website of coffee brand, Colorado Mountain Coffee, that sells coffee exclusively online. From the website of the company, it stands very clear that the target of the brand is outdoors people such as climbers, skiers and hikers; people that like the idea of a mountain-roasted coffee. The company has done a very good job in trying to capture its target. They did a focus group before launching the website to understand what customers wanted and they built the entire website around the idea of a very natural and healthy product. The website has many interactive features that try to capture customers’ attention and make them interact with the brand. There is a blog where customers can exchange opinions and suggestions on coffee, an e-commerce store and also a video of the owner of the company climbing a tree. The company did a lot of work in trying to optimize its SEO ranking and they also used Google AdWords to increase the website traffic. They use also social media such as Facebook and Twitter with content related fan pages and promotion of contests such as triathlons, aquathlons, bike races. They also created an App that allows you to calculate the amount of coffee you need for your particular taste. It really seems like they have done all the homework! However the best result they got it’s the 1,000 downloads of the coffee calculator App. The Google AdWords campaigns drove just few sales conversions; Facebook has only 59 “likes” and Twitter 144 followers. The website is still quite new and even if now it’s reaching 1,000 unique visitors per month, sales are still low.

What are the digital marketing golden rules?! I think it’s still an ongoing process of customizing, creating, experimenting and improving where every industry and customer segment has with its own peculiarities. Fortunately the low cost of this vehicle is what makes this mechanism possible. Since abandoning Google AdWords, Colorado Mountain Coffee’s marketing expense is $30 per month. Do you think it is worth to keep trying?! I think so.