When we hear the word “marketing”, most of us think of clever taglines, eye-catching billboards, and witty advertisements. That’s why it’s not surprising why many view marketing as a fusion of expression and creativity. But when we think of market research, trend forecasting, demographic analysis, and other technical aspects of marketing, we start thinking that marketing is indeed scientific.
The debate whether marketing is a form of art or science started in 1945, after Paul Converse, a scientist, explored the scientific development of marketing. Since then, hundreds of discussions and articles began popping out opposing each other about the possible explanations of whether marketing is art or science. While there’s no consistent conclusion to these claims, the debate is still in view.
A multidimensional digital marketing strategy is a combination of virtual channels, such as social media, search engines, and websites. No wonder why you’ll find various digital marketing firms that specialize in a specific niche. For example, a copy-writing firm focuses on creating relevant content that sparks clicks and conversation, whereas an SEO company aims to help businesses by improving their visibility on search engines.
In this article, we’ll discuss why digital marketing is neither art nor science, rather a combination of both. We’ll look at how scientific data and captivating content work together to create an effective marketing strategy.
Creating emotional connections
If the purpose of a marketing campaign is to increase demand, the strategy should focus on improving audience appeal. One of the main purposes of marketing is to influence the audience’s behavior to bring people closer to the company, brand, product, and service.
Analyzing behaviors from a psychological perspective and understanding how the audience responds to a message is the primary focus of the marketing industry for many decades. But ever since the role of technology became widespread in almost every industry, this pushed marketing to be more scientific and progressive, led by experimentation and testing.
For marketers, their core purpose is to create an effective marketing campaign and present a brand message that is well-received by the audience. To form connections, they have to understand who they’re trying to influence, their habits, receptiveness, and behaviors towards various marketing tactics and messages.
The manner of delivering messages to the audience is one of the key elements of marketing associated with art. A successful marketing strategy establishes an emotional bond with its target customers. Art is an effective way of forming deeper connections with customers and prospects by drawing from their wants and needs. It should convey the audience’s fears, frustrations, desires, and other qualities that make them human. Without these artistic aspects, a campaign is likely to fail in its purpose to encourage the audience to take action.
Measuring market performance
Marketers today recognize that a successful marketing campaign does not focus on strategy alone. It should rely on pieces of evidence to be successful or effective. Although creativity is highly important, marketers should prove what makes it important and how important it is for the audience.
A mathematical element is involved in measuring marketing performance. From numbers, charts, and measurements, marketers are expected to use these metrics to demonstrate and analyze how a certain campaign performs and understand its returns based on a spender’s viewpoint.
Aside from assessing performance, these metrics are imperative in forming data-driven strategies for succeeding campaigns. This pushes marketers to spot the strong and weak points of a campaign and apply necessary improvements to produce something more interesting and innovative.
Marketers working on the scientific side of marketing rely on mathematical evidence before they arrive at a decision. This collected evidence will not only be used as data, but they will interpret and analyze it from different viewpoints to demonstrate and measure the return of investment of a specific marketing campaign.
Using data to dictate creativity
All marketing campaigns rely on creativity. It is a key element in producing unique campaigns in the eyes of its human audiences. To appeal to emotions, you need to understand the complexity of a product’s scientific elements to be expressed to its audience effectively.
For instance, creating a website, e-book, flyer, or piece of content requires a marketer to be creative. It becomes an art form in itself where a person engages in the creation of an idea or concept. At the same time, a marketer uses data to determine what strategy works and what doesn’t. Marketing is a very expensive endeavor, so you need to know how you’re spending and where the funds go.
The success of a digital marketing strategy lies in the marriage of art and science, facts, and intuition. An effective marketing initiative doesn’t simply rely on good data, but it also considers the value of human interaction. This is what makes marketing a uniquely fascinating and challenging field—marketers should understand the art and scientific aspects of marketing to create a compelling marketing campaign.