With every holiday weekend the television channels are plagued by a rash of commercials advertising home furniture and DIY store sales, and, I expect just as frequently, the good lady of the household rolls her eyes when contemplating, perhaps fearfully, what damage her beloved spouse will do this time.

The same analogy (without the gender difference this time!) is true of the marketing industry and its attitude towards the online medium – how many times have I spoken to marketing managers who are quite adamant in their belief that they know exactly what they are doing when it comes to online promotions? Yet the maxim of modern day marketing is true also when applied to the marketing manager as well: as in the marketing industry, there are no longer any through-the-line agencies – rather the industry has segmented into specialist concerns – and any marketing manager who believes themselves to be master of each vein could very likely be courting trouble. This is especially true when concerned with online marketing: far more so than when compared to mediums such as print or DRTV, for no other form of marketing is evolving so quickly or to the extent that a finger must be kept on the pulse on a daily basis.

Take the average pay-per-click campaign that most are quite comfortable with. Why should this seemingly easy advertising tool require so much more time than many marketing managers are willing to give it? PPC (or CPC) advertising’s success (or lack of it) is very much dependent on how much the marketing manager is willing to spend on bidding for keywords – and to do so efficiently this requires continual management and awareness of what the competition is spending – in short, it is bid management. I have known of companies who have whole teams of dedicated staff controlling these adverts – and likewise there are those companies that have lost thousands of pounds through simply ‘leaving the campaigns to run!’

But this is just the start: adept marketing managers should be interested in where the visitors to their website are coming from, what page they go onto, how long they spend on your website – what turns them on or off. Here we are in the realms not so much of website promotion and lead generation, but rather that of ‘Persuasive architecture’, the very design and layout, from images to copy, that encourage visitors to stay and make a purchase.

Once such communication has been analysed, it is easy to work out the CPA (cost-per-acquisition) and hence to see how successful the marketing spend has been. But once again, such a project is not for the untrained marketing manager – again online DIY is not good enough in 95% of all cases to achieve such effective management information.

The emphasis on DIY marketing in the online arena has arisen, I believe, for two reasons: the first is simply that it is cheap when compared to traditional marketing – the potential to reach a vast audience at the fraction of the cost (take any example: outdoor, DRTV, ambient) is readily apparent, and has given rise to the second reason: many marketing managers believe that online marketing works on the same principle as a ‘numbers game’ and that there is therefore little skill involved. Such a belief has also come about due to the lack of traditional measures that many marketers have been educated to believe in: demographics and the like are seemingly forgotten by many when it comes to online work.

What is lacking here in the marketing manager’s mind is that good communication cannot simply be left to run itself: online activity needs constant monitoring, and for many SMEs that may very well mean outsourcing before the amateur DIY enthusiast strikes again!