Manitobans embracing digital marketing tools

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This article was published 21/05/2010 (5834 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MANITOBA’S marketing professionals might be a little behind the curve when it comes to digital marketing but virtually all of them believe it is here to stay.

The Canadian Marketing Association’s Manitoba chapter held its second annual digital marketing conference on Thursday and while chapter president Jason Abbott said Manitoba may be behind its peers in Toronto and Vancouver it doesn’t mean social networking, online advertising and the array of digital marketing tools now available are not being embraced here at home.

“Marketers are being held accountable to real numbers these days,” said Abbott, vice-president business development at Cocoon Branding.

“There has been a big shift over the last 10 years. Digital marketing allows us to use more financial rules and metrics. You can see exactly what each initiative does.”

Mike Moran, chief strategist for the New York social media agency Converseon, was a 30-year veteran engineer at IBM and a pioneer in search and content technologies. He said because of the linkages that can be documented from one click on a website to the next, companies can directly connect marketing with sales and determine what is effective and what is not.

“It’s not necessarily because digital marketing produces a higher return on investment, although it often does,” Moran said.

“But it’s so much easier to calculate what is happening than it is for off-line material.”

Online social networking sites like Facebook turn that ability to quantify the impact of the marketing or advertising material into a whole other realm of research.

Data mining, using as little information as an email address, can allow marketing people to hone in on an audience like never before.

“Over the last five years more than half the population is now using Facebook or other social networking,” Abbott said.

“Facebook users have allowed their information to be public and that allows us marketers to review this data and see who we are really relevant to.”

While that may suggest some inherent shifts in our general sense of privacy it is definitely a powerful tool that marketers are embracing in an ever-widening way.

The fact that it is only the second time the Manitoba CMA chapter has held such a digital marketing event might be an indication of the fact local pros have not been in the game all that long.

But a survey of 200 marketing professionals and their customers conducted by Probe Research shows that they are keen to catch up.

Scott MacKay, president of Probe, said more than half of those surveyed use smartphones with an array of applications and many use social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for corporate presence.

“This group is really into it,” he said.

Not only that, but only about four per cent of them are at all cynical about the technology.

“Most are very bullish,” MacKay said.

“They will be spending more money in the future even in these challenging economic times. This is the future and they said they are really embracing it.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca