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By Randy Scotland, ACA

When Geoff Ramsey talks, smart marketers listen up ‒ with good reason. With his grip on the latest research trends and best practices, the chairman of eMarketer offers a rich understanding and big-picture perspective of the digital landscape and its impact on marketing and media.

In the following interview, Ramsey, who is a featured speaker at ACA’s “Re-Mastering Marketing” conference on November 5th, weighs in on the big challenges ‒ and coping strategies ‒ for marketers today.

ACA: Keeping up with all the quick-fire changes in the digital world is like aiming at a moving target. What’s the one thing marketers should be doing to maintain their focus?

Ramsey: A “moving target”? Keeping up with digital is like aiming at thousands of moving targets, all with flashing neon lights beckoning your attention 24/7/365!

But seriously, staying focused in the hyper-dynamic digital market requires two things. First, you need the discipline to remain unyieldingly committed to your core business objectives. That will help you avoid being distracted by shiny new objects that, while cool, are unlikely to contribute to your goals. It’s all about being strategic, rather than tactical in your approach.

The other way to stay focused comes right out of our philosophy at eMarketer, namely to avoid placing too much weight on any single source of information, whether that be a research survey, industry analyst, blogger or vendor in the digital space.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing everything you read; rather take the more patient approach and evaluate information and data from multiple sources over a period of time. That considered view usually leads to much better decisions, and helps you minimize costly mistakes.

ACA: Do you foresee a day when consumers will balk at the seemingly endless proliferation of new digital screens, channels and applications?

Ramsey: No, consumers seem to have an unrelenting appetite for new digital stuff. That doesn’t mean that every future channel, technology or platform will warrant their precious attention, but they will always be happy to fold in something new that adds genuine value to their lives.

The real issue here, for marketers at least, is the continuing shift in power going to the consumer.

With digital devices, particularly mobile ones such as smartphones, consumers have unprecedented control over their media consumption and the information they can access about brands, wherever they happen to be. They are also far more skeptical and resistant of traditional advertising pitches.

What consumers will balk at are old advertising forms delivered in new channels. You can call it “content marketing” or, as I like to say, “magnetic content,” but it is becoming essential for brands to create content across platforms and devices that genuinely resonates with consumers.

In other words, marketers increasingly need to create branded messaging and experiences that are inherently useful, entertaining, interesting or otherwise compelling ‒ in their own right. It’s all about attracting, rather than distracting consumers.

ACA: What’s the biggest challenge in shifting to a multi-channel marketing strategy?

Ramsey: The intense fragmentation of media and sales channels, including via mobile devices, absolutely requires marketers to adopt a multi-channel marketing approach. But very few are doing it, at least capably.

When your goal extends beyond the immediate sale (i.e., direct response), you are faced with an unbelievably complex set of interrelated variables that must be weighted carefully to reflect their respective impacts on branding. The core challenge here is to properly assign those weights to all the channels in your media mix, when the purchase cycle can take weeks, months or years, and it can be vastly different for different consumers.

In addition, first-click or last-click attribution usually paints ridiculously distorted view of what’s really moving the needle over a period of time.

ACA: When it comes to Big Data, is there too much information and not enough time and resources to make actionable sense of it all?

Ramsey: Most of us by now are pretty confused about what “big data” means, and certainly how to use it. I prefer to use the term “smart data,” implying that it’s more about quality than quantity.

I see too many marketers building dashboards with every metric they can lay their hands on. Do you really need the kitchen sink?! And by the way, the easier metrics to measure are usually the least important, in terms of relating to your business objectives.

This comes right back to the first question, about staying focused. If you really know what’s critical for your driving your business, you should limit your metrics to those that can be tightly linked with those drivers.

Ideally, you want to link metrics at three different levels. At the very top of the pyramid are your financial metrics, such as sales, return on investment, etc. Those are the ones your C-suite cares about. At the next level down are the strategic metrics, such as brand awareness or purchase intent. At the lowest level are the tactical metrics which measure consumer engagement with a specific channel, such as Facebook fans, Twitter followers, videos watched, mobile apps downloaded, etc.

Again, the key is to establish links between those metrics across all three levels, culminating in the financial measures of success.

ACA: What is the key message you would like delegates to take away from your presentation on November 5th?

Ramsey: That’s easy, it’s simply an amplification of the very concepts we’ve just discussed, only peppered with numerous survey findings, data points, case studies and visual frameworks that bring the concepts to light.