What Do You Need for Great Digital Marketing?
The ingredients for the best digital marketing, if you were to Google it, usually include a basic set of fundamentals:
- Understand your value—from message to product to service.
- Know your audience… and I mean really well.
- Understand your platforms for reaching your audience and how they’re constantly changing + don’t rely on just one tactic or platform.
- Post engaging content that encourages interaction.
- Keep a pulse on trends, conversations, and the zeitgeist of your audience.
- Hire the right people who understand social media, web tracking, search engines, advertising, etc.
- Maintain a great aesthetic in your content.
- Be [insert buzzword like authentic, trustworthy, different, etc.].
- Like…oh my gosh “tell stories”, “show not tell”, and all that.
- Convey urgency and a clear call to action.
- Don’t be afraid to test and fail.
- Use data—report, analyze, make decisions.
I don’t think any of this is groundbreaking at this point.
You do need these things for great digital marketing.
But what about great marketing… that glorifies God?
How Does Digital Marketing Glorify God?
Great marketing doesn’t automatically equal praising God. Great marketing can sell terrible products, services, and ideas.
In fact, most marketing out there is not interested in God’s glory. Instead, it glorifies dollars, votes, prestige, and so on.
Glorifying God starts in the heart. You have to want it. You have to make it the top priority. That will change what you spend energy on. For us marketers, it narrows what we can and ought to market and in what ways.
Granted, you can glorify God by doing your work well and being a good colleague, regardless of whether you are marketing Sunday Mass or not. There are great marketers who glorify God by their hard work and practice of virtue at large brands, small businesses, nonprofits, and in government, across the globe.
But I’m not talking about great digital marketers who glorify God. I’m talking about marketing.
That means the strategy, content, tactics, everything seeks God’s glory first. Dioceses and parishes ought to be the case studies. If you seek to save souls and bring them closer to Christ, then the marketing should be worthy of God.
Let’s explore what Godly marketing requires.
Great digital marketing needs audience research. Godly marketing needs magnificence.
Every marketer who wants to identify the goals and obstacles of the hero (the audience), and the equipment they need to attain goals, such as tastemakers, products, ideas, services, behaviors, habits, and more, immerses himself in the audience.
To ensure the marketing effort glorifies God, it must be characterized by the virtue of magnificence. This is doing great things for God. Not for your agency, your client, or yourself. For God. At the beginning, this shapes the tone, the benchmarks, and the interaction between team members and between organization and audience.
It needs a valuable offering behind it. Godly marketing needs honesty.
When you understand your audience, it forces you to reflect on whether you have something of real value to offer them. A lot of marketing, however clever and memorable, is offering something you can easily live life without. Yet the marketing is so brilliantly attuned to the audience’s wants and fears that it actually convinces you of the futility of life without this idea, or phone, or bug spraying subscription.
To ensure the marketing glorifies God, you simply have to be honest. Does the audience honestly need this? God knows what we truly need and what we don’t. I’m convinced that if marketing was honest, tomorrow, the economy would be in turmoil for a hot minute.
Digital marketing needs an active message that resonates here and now. Godly marketing needs meekness.
You won’t get anybody’s attention if your message isn’t targeted, emotional, and memorable. We usually remember things that made us laugh, feel, or think hard. This is why everyone recommends stories. Stories move our hearts, touch our souls, and challenge our way of thinking. Embedded in them are messages that make us think, speak, act, and buy differently. If a message resonates and is tied to an action, you can bank on something happening.
There is overwhelming evidence supporting that time commitments follow emotional commitments. If you watched or read or listened, and you had strong emotions, the action will likely be strong, be it occupying your thoughts, encouraging your financial liberalism, or making you champion whatever it was.
To ensure the marketing glorifies God, that emotional messaging that plays beautifully on the strings of human hearts must be founded upon a serenity of spirit. What I mean is a marketer can’t let herself be swept up in the moment, or be pulled by the gale-force winds of culture, trends, backlash, seeming failure, or going viral. She must be steady, like a rock in the storm she creates about herself.
Glorifying God in marketing is, necessarily, never going to be a hidden labor. It attracts attention by definition, and with attention comes scrutiny, clamor, and pressure.
In addition to meekness, Godly marketing needs moderation. We have to pay attention to balance. Not only is this essential for marketers in their work vs. personal lives, it’s critical in the marketing so that no message or call to action is given more weight than it deserves. This prevents burnout in marketers, and ego in marketing.
Great digital marketing needs a brand that is memorable. Godly marketing needs humility.
I firmly believe that marketers, especially on the tails of a successful campaign, feel the temptation to pride. After all, you created something exciting, powerful, and impactful. You were a part of it. Great marketing produces results. We remember the ads, brands (individual or organization), and campaigns that left a mark on our habits and lives.
Will you be humble? Will your marketing be humble? This may be more difficult to discern than other aspects of marketing. The humble marketing, like the marketer, does not acclaim itself, exaggerate, or glorify itself in any way. It only points toward the value to the audience and the value of the improvements to persons and society. It keeps nothing for itself.
On a side note: I have a complicated relationship with marketing awards, and awards in general. On one hand, people should be rewarded for great work and accomplishments, individually or as a team. On the other, our reward is not in prizes, trophies, or applause. So… it’s complicated.
Great marketing needs data. Godly marketing needs docility.
You can’t fly blind and expect your marketing efforts to never crash. So many “wing it” or make it up as they go. But data has taught us that we need data. We need to know what works and what doesn’t. We need to create robust reporting infrastructures so that we have line of sight into every part of the audience’s journey.
The virtue of docility is the willingness to learn and be taught by someone else. Marketers don’t know everything, nor should they be expected to know everything. Social media changes hourly. None of us can know everything about platforms at all times and be executing at the highest level across all platforms simultaneously.
We shouldn’t pretend to know it all or act like we are never surprised, caught off guard, at a loss for ideas, or unsure of how to proceed. Sometimes we don’t know what’s best. Sometimes we’re stumped.
Being docile doesn’t mean giving up or removing ourselves from projects because we lack skill or information. It means being taught. It means active learning, acquiring new knowledge, testing new ideas, and willing to be wrong or in need of guidance.
Great digital marketing needs adapting to changes in tech, trends, formats. Godly marketing needs perseverance.
Digital marketing changes with the changes in audience habits, advances in the technology available, the budgets of clients, and so much more. It’s difficult to be an expert in everything because there’s too much, and to be an expert in one tool can be quite limiting. Just as you become an expert, it changes, and your expertise becomes worthless overnight.
The only valuable expertise is that you will always need to adapt. Always.
It’s my view that the great marketers stick to the timeless truths about human nature and never pretend to know it all. They prefer learning, quantifying, and optimizing.
Godly marketing perseveres.
It discerns when to stay the course and when to alter course. It is patient and rightly ordered so that distractions do not supplant it, nor doubts prematurely disrupt it. At Yellow Line, it’s almost always a combination of gut, conversation, investigation, and data that changes our charted direction.
Have thoughts on Godly marketing? Join the conversation! Shoot us an email at info@yellowlinedigital.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
