By Andrew Fischer

A quick glance at any marketing or advertising Lumascape matrix may lead to a conclusion that digital media buying has become vastly more complex, fragmented and expensive in recent years.

The proliferation of platforms, technologies and mediums, including walled gardens, has indeed raised the intimidation factor, especially for the digital marketing novice.

However, with minimal education and experience, digital advertising is more accessible and flexible than ever for marketers with budgets of all sizes.

Lining up
One constant in a sea of change is that media buying will persist as the largest line item in most marketing budgets.

But unlike traditional media channels, digital marketers have the ability to monitor their investments and make optimizations to ad inventory, budget and audience pools in real-time.

A particular subset of digital marketing, programmatic advertising also leverages data and automation to yield unparalleled specificity of targeting with efficient scale.

With access to platforms including demand-side platforms, pixel tracking and attribution models, marketers are quickly able to execute campaigns, monitor Web traffic and track revenue generated from digital media placements – all in real time.

In minutes, a marketing manager at a fledgling snack brand can build and launch a campaign that targets recent buyers of Fritos and Lays while combining demographic, geo-specific, and contextual targeting layers.

This example is not a million-dollar campaign. In fact, this highly targeted campaign can be effective with budgets starting at less than $5,000.

Killing it
With the measurability of digital media, that budget can grow, shift and optimize to meet the particular marketing goals.

If a particular tactic is lagging, kill it and move the budget to the best performing campaigns.

The implementation of a tag management system enables the remote placement of any tracking and conversion pixels for your digital campaigns – thus simple and easy measurement and optimization on the fly.

A strong tag management system leveraging in-platform campaign metrics empowers marketers to measure and showcase the results of all digital media campaigns.

Naturally, global enterprise marketers can afford to employ multiple platforms that focus on often-disparate areas such as data management (DMP), smart tag management, CRM, attribution and demand-side-platforms (DSP).

As the landscape has evolved, however, many of these core digital marketing components can be found within integrated and seamless stacks at various levels of complexity, features and price.

WITH THE RIGHT platforms and supporting team, any marketer can easily streamline and improve its digital marketing efforts.

Add to that a little education and experience, and any intimidation will be replaced by a confident mastery reflected in a positive ROI on all digital marketing campaigns.

Andrew Fischer is cofounder/CEO of Choozle, Denver, CO. Reach him at [email protected].