Digital Media Execution vs Digital Marketing: Know the Differences
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Pathlabs Marketing |
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October 3rd, 2024 |
Understanding the nuances between digital media execution and digital marketing can be complex. This blog outlines both concepts, discusses their differences, and shares essential insights to enhance your understanding. Let’s get started.
The Differences Between Digital Media Execution vs Digital Marketing
Definition and Scope
Digital media execution and digital marketing differ primarily in definition and scope. Before we get started, let’s review the basics of digital media.
Digital media encompasses the digital-specific outlets and tools used for the distribution of information and content. Digital media channels include:
Websites and blogs
Email
Social Media Platforms
Search Engines
Streaming Services
Mobile Devices and Apps
Digital out-of-home locations
Digital marketing involves strategically using digital media channels to disseminate marketing communications and content aimed at reaching and engaging audiences. Performing digital marketing helps enhance brand visibility and experience, showcases products and services, and ultimately guides users through the marketing funnel.
Nowadays, there is a multitude of digital marketing tactics teams can deploy across digital media channels.
Content Creation and SEO: Developing content (written, graphic, video, etc.) on an owned website location and optimizing it for search engine visibility.
Email and SMS Marketing: Distributing targeted messages through emails, newsletters, and text campaigns.
Social Media Engagement: Managing and publishing content on owned, organic social media profiles.
Influencer Collaborations: Partnering with influencers to promote products on social media platforms.
Sponsored Content: Commissioning sponsored articles or whitepapers with major publications.
Earned Media: Benefiting from third-party media coverage that is not directly paid for but contributes to marketing efforts.
We are missing one key digital marketing tactic—digital media execution, often shortened to media execution.
Digital media execution is synonymous with digital advertising—the building and launch of paid campaigns that serve ads across different digital media channels.
Teams can build and launch multiple types of paid advertising campaigns. The main digital media execution channels are display, native, online video, OTT/CTV, paid search, paid social, digital audio, in-app, and in-game, among others.
Digital media execution is Pathlabs’ domain, and we will focus the rest of this blog exploring how digital media execution and digital marketing compare.
Objectives and Goals
The objective of performing digital marketing is to leverage digital channels to reach and engage users, with the ultimate goal of driving them through the marketing funnel—from initial awareness and consideration to engagement and conversions with the end goal of securing them as customers.
Digital media execution is a tactic that falls under the digital marketing umbrella; brands and entities similarly perform digital media execution to reach and engage users down various parts of the funnel.
It is common for brands and entities to include multiple tactics in their overall digital marketing strategy, which may or may not include digital media execution.
Financial Investment
Digital media execution operates on a pay-for-play basis. This means that executing digital media campaigns and serving ads requires a financial commitment in the form of media spend. Depending on the chosen channel and ad-buying platform used for execution, teams might pay on a cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) basis or opt for a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-action (CPA) model.
While digital media execution often demands significant investment – especially on competitive channels or when securing premium inventory placements – not all digital marketing tactics require substantial direct financial outlay.
Conducting any form of digital marketing inherently incurs some costs, such as team salaries and technology subscriptions, and might include paid partnerships or sponsorships.
However, more cost-effective digital marketing tactics are available, such as creating organic content on a social media profile, launching email campaigns and newsletters, or publishing owned blog content that can appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) for free.
Importance
Both digital marketing and digital media execution have high importance, no matter the industry or vertical. In today’s saturated digital attention economy, brands and entities must invest in these strategies to stand out, keep their audiences aware of the overall brand, share announcements, introduce new offerings, or highlight seasonal events.
If a brand or entity neglects to invest in digital marketing and digital media execution activities, it risks becoming invisible to potential customers—a scenario detrimental to any business.
Domain Complexity
Digital marketing and digital media execution are very complex and demand substantial domain expertise.
Brands and entities must thoroughly understand their target audience and identify the most effective digital tactics and channels for engagement. These challenges escalate when managing marketing and media budgets, as brands and entities must allocate their funds wisely across efforts and channels. They must also meticulously track, measure, and attribute their spending related to the outcomes driven by users.
This level of detailed management often requires full-time dedication, which many brands and entities cannot sustain internally. Consequently, they usually opt to collaborate with independent agencies and services that specialize in various aspects of digital marketing and media execution.
Moreover, as digital media execution grows in demand, many independent agencies have begun offering these services, often necessitating collaboration with a Media Execution Partner (MEP).
Benefits and Challenges
Digital marketing and digital media execution render similar benefits and challenges.
Benefits
Audience Engagement and Broad Digital Reach: Digital marketing and digital media execution tactics enable brands and entities to get their content and communications in front of more diverse, digital-based audiences. This visibility is crucial for brand awareness and can open the door to reaching new potential customers that non-digital marketing and media tactics might fail to achieve.
Data-Driven Insights: The tools and platforms used for digital marketing and digital media execution can help provide valuable data insights about audience engagement and the effectiveness of different digital channels – especially with digital media execution. This information helps inform future investment decisions and offers a clearer picture of your audience.
Challenges
Resource Intensive: Effective digital marketing and digital media execution require substantial time, money, resources, and expertise. For smaller or mid-sized brands and entities, harnessing the budget and people to facilitate these efforts can be particularly challenging.
Selection and Justification: With numerous digital marketing and digital media execution tactics and channels available, choosing the right ones and justifying the expenditure can be daunting.
Uncertain ROI: Measuring the return on investment (ROI) for digital marketing and digital media activities is complex and unpredictable. It can be hard to discern how much you overall are spending and getting back in return for a given effort. On the other hand, you might yield high returns on one effort but struggle to replicate this success consistently moving forward.
Creative Demands: Both digital marketing and digital media execution initiatives require design and creative skills, including content writing, graphic design, video production, and digital asset development. Not every brand or entity has a creative design team in its back pocket.
The Role of Digital Media Execution
Digital media execution plays a pivotal role in enabling brands and entities to extend their reach and engagement with users who are not typically or as easily accessible through standard digital and organic marketing tactics.
With digital media execution, teams can plan, execute, analyze, optimize, and report on paid ad campaigns that target long-tail, niche online locations, as well as major, high-traffic publisher locations across multiple digital channels—such as display, CTV, paid search, and paid social—and devices. In short, they have a plethora of places and users they can target with their ad content.
Another significant advantage of digital media execution is its ability to cater to different stages of the marketing funnel. For instance, teams can launch CTV and display ad campaigns to generate general awareness, leverage paid social efforts to encourage engagement and clicks and utilize paid search when users are ready to lean in and convert. This versatility enables strong, performance-driven outcomes.
The Unique Complexity of Digital Media Execution
Although digital media execution is indeed a digital marketing tactic, we tend to perceive it as quite disparate from other tactics like SEO, email marketing, and content creation.
The most notable distinction is its focus on building and launching paid advertising campaigns that serve ads across different online locations. However, multiple additional factors contribute to its uniqueness in digital marketing.
Complex and Fragmented Ecosystem: Digital media execution operates within its own complex ecosystem, with thousands of publishers offering their ad space programmatically and thousands of advertisers aiming to buy this space to serve their ads, supported by a plethora of AdTech tools and intermediaries every step of the way.
Key Players in the Industry: Major platforms like Google Ads, The Trade Desk, DV360, Meta Ads Manager, and Pinterest, among many others, empower advertising teams to build and launch campaigns across various placements and in multiple formats, each with its own learning curve for execution.
Sophisticated Audience Targeting: Digital media campaigns enable the targeting of sophisticated, data-driven audience segments. This allows advertisers to deliver ad content precisely to the most relevant users, thereby enhancing performance and reaching previously inaccessible customers. Further refinement of targeting can be based on demographics, geography, interests, behaviors, and more. Additionally, teams can upload first-party data, implement pixel retargeting, and develop lookalike audience strategies within ad-buying platforms.
Intensive Tech Stack Requirements: Digital media execution demands a comprehensive tech stack, including demand-side platforms, ad servers, reporting and attribution tools, and enhanced privacy measures. A report we conducted with AdExchanger revealed that independent agencies use as many as 18 different AdTech tools to manage their media execution tasks.
Specialized Tasks and Expertise: Digital media execution involves specialized tasks that might be unfamiliar to marketing generalists. These include implementing tracking with pixels and UTMs, managing a variety of creative assets, and determining the right levers to pull for campaign optimization.
As previously mentioned, digital media execution is a highly complex field of digital marketing. This complexity leads many brands to seek assistance from independent agencies. However, with the growing demand for such services, these agencies often find themselves needing additional support.
Consequently, many turn to Media Execution Partners (MEPs), who provide the essential expertise, workflows, and technology required to effectively manage and execute these campaigns.
Core Components of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is not just a core component but a necessity for any brand or entity today, regardless of industry or vertical.
From retail to healthcare, automotive to quick-service restaurants, and even government sectors—each requires a robust digital marketing strategy to get audiences into the funnel to engage and convert in whatever way the entity values.
Digital marketing strategies should robustly detail who the target audiences and specific personas are, which channels these audiences engage with most, and the level of monetary investment required to engage them effectively.
Implementing a digital marketing strategy might range from maintaining a basic website with organic social media tactics to deploying a comprehensive approach that includes content marketing, SEO, lead capture processes, email marketing, influencer sponsorships, paid partnerships, and whitepaper opportunities.
Establishing an omnichannel digital marketing presence is a prevalent digital marketing strategy. This approach leverages various digital marketing tactics—including digital media execution—to ensure that brands can reach and engage potential customers across several touchpoints, providing a seamless and integrated user experience.
How to Integrate Digital Marketing and Digital Media Execution
Strengthen Your Digital Marketing Foundation
Before investing in digital media execution, ensure your core digital marketing elements, such as organic social media, website, and other efforts, such as content creation, are robust. By doing so, when users actually come in through your digital media execution efforts, they will have a more solid user experience that will foster continued engagement opportunities.
Leverage Digital Media Execution for Key Promotional Moments
While you can continuously hone your digital marketing game, consider investing in digital media execution to generate awareness, engagement, and even conversions leading up to and during crucial events or promotional periods. Use it to amplify your message and reach a broader audience when it matters most.
Adopt an Always-On Strategy
Along these same lines, while you might maintain digital marketing efforts like content creation and organic strategies, consider the benefits of executing ongoing, always-on digital media campaigns, such as continuous display ads, paid social, or paid search campaigns. These can be more budget-friendly and help maintain consistent audience awareness over time.
Integrate Across All Marketing Efforts
When launching a new piece of content – such as a significant e-book or lead generation magnet – making a big announcement or promoting an initiative, it’s essential to synergize your digital marketing and digital media execution efforts. Ensure that each digital media channel and strategy you operate features and promotes this content, allowing you to fire on all cylinders with the same unified message.
Utilize Data to Inform Decisions
Leverage data from your digital marketing efforts to inform your digital media execution efforts and vice versa. For instance, you can look to your organic social following, key inbound leads, and so on to decide on channel and audience targeting tactics for digital media execution.
Navigate Digital Media Execution with a Media Execution Partner (MEP)
Before reading this blog, did you know that digital media execution is a much more nuanced domain falling under the digital marketing umbrella? Many don’t.
Essentially, digital media execution refers to the concept of executing paid ad campaigns across various digital media channels such as display, paid social, paid search, and CTV/OTT – with many other channels and ad formats.
Performing digital media execution is far more complex than many other accessible digital marketing tactics. Therefore, brands and entities have increased their demands for media execution services from the independent agencies they work with.
For independent agencies striving to deliver top-tier media execution performance to these clients, we recommend collaborating with a Media Execution Partner (MEP). An MEP equips independent agencies with the necessary people, workflows, and technologies to help them successfully execute digital media campaigns for clients.
This partnership takes work off the agency's plate, enabling their teams to focus more on client growth, business development, and maintaining profitability while the MEP handles the day-to-day intricacies of digital media execution. Contact Pathlabs today to learn more.
