Okay, let’s do this. Today, I’m going to teach you something about digital marketing. For half a century, consumers media consumption was dominated by offline media. Today, more than half of all the media we consume comes through digital channels. Reaching consumers through digital channels offers several advantages over traditional media.

First, firms’ ability to target specific consumers has increased greatly. For example, an online retailer can decide to advertise only to those consumers that have visited its online store. The second big advantage of digital marketing is measurement. Online, it’s possible to track individual consumers across time and even across devices.

With measurement comes the ability to optimize. Testing two different advertising campaigns, so called A B testing, is easy in digital marketing, yet many firms struggle to embrace it. Why? One inhibitor for digital marketing acceptance is novelty. Digital marketing instruments are still in the flux and come and go quickly.

Moreover, understanding and integrating the various digital marketing instruments is not an easy task. Surefire ways for using them don’t exist, yet which potentially exposes advertisers to risk of failure. The most important challenge, however, is mindset. For 50 years, marketing executives based their decisions on intuition.

Experience and gut feelings. Today, marketing executives need analytical skills, at least as much as they need intuition for a successful digital marketing campaign.