SPOILER alert for Infinity War if you haven’t seen it already.

Hey fellow Marvel fans and digital marketers across the galaxy! If you’re looking to discover the six vital elements needed for an unstoppable digital marketing strategy, you’ve come to the right place.

Although Disney’s Infinity War premier has come and gone, we couldn’t stop thinking about how cool the infinity stones were. We began to wonder:

What are the six components of digital marketing that allow you to dominate the galaxy?

In Marvel comic lore there are six infinity stones (or gems) that grant the user godlike powers. Each stone is incredibly powerful on its own, but combined, the user becomes unstoppable.

But what does that have to do with digital marketing?

Well, look at it like this:

Each marketing channel has its own unique benefits, just like each infinity stone. Yet, when a marketing plan takes a holistic approach, each channel performs more efficiently and costs less overall, eventually turning your business into an unstoppable force.

So by now, you’re wondering:

What are the six infinity stones of digital marketing?

Reality

Space

Mind

Time

Soul

Power

The Gauntlet

Grants the user the ability to manipulate reality itself – even contradict the laws of physics – and create any number of alternate realities.

In marketing, our version of the reality stone is paid search advertising.

When someone has a problem, one of the first places they go is Google. You want to appear there when they are looking – allowing you to grant their wish and solve their problems with your product or service.

The only way to do so, however, is with paid search.

Successful paid search campaigns can alter the reality of your own marketing strategy by enhancing your SEO efforts and increasing traffic to your website, in turn generating more business.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what paid search can do.

The reality stone thrives off creativity, and it’s the same for paid search.

Have you ever wanted to send emails directly to customers who view your competitor’s content? Now you can!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could re-target cart abandoners by showing them a special discount ad wherever they go? Now you can!

Why it’s vital to your business’ dominance:

Search engine giants like Google became big for a reason–they make money off advertisers. The stone-cold reality is that sometimes you need to pay to play.

And opting out isn’t an option either.

Even if you had all of the other stones in this article, you would be completely defenseless against your competitor – who is almost certainly using this one.

In fact, your competitor could even bid on your brand name! Talk about reality altering!

The best way to guarantee your dominance is to have a strong paid search strategy and beat your competitor to the punch.

Grants the user the power to move anyone or anything to anywhere they choose.

That includes warping, teleportation, super speed, and potentially even omnipresence.

The space stone is social media advertising.

With social media advertising, you can choose to place your ads in front of anyone.

Let’s look at the biggest player, Facebook:

With over 2 billion users worldwide, this is the advertising platform that will allow your brand to be as close to omnipresent as possible.

Unlike paid search, social media advertising allows marketers to broadcast their message to an audience that may want your product but isn’t actively looking for it, much like older TV and radio ads.

Unlike TV and radio, though, social media advertising provides comprehensive reporting and allows you to track every lead.

Facebook’s targeting capability makes it very popular among advertisers:

With Facebook, you can target a specific list of people directly, so you can advertise to people that like Marvel movies, people who are recently married, or people who like obscure French cheeses.

You can even target people that have been to your website but haven’t converted (yet).

Social media advertising can be a great source of inexpensive, quality traffic.

Combined with organic social media and your current digital footprint, social media can take your business anywhere you want to go.

Why it’s vital to your business’ dominance:

Social media is where stuff goes viral.

In the world of social media, you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, Google+, Pinterest, Yelp, and so forth.

Your business can be present in all of these locations throughout the galaxy/internet at the same time if you’re leveraging social media properly.

Even without an organic following, you can pay to deliver your message to anyone on whichever platform(s) they happen to frequent.

Without the social media space stone, your business would never be able to reach every corner of the galaxy.

The mind stone enhances the user’s mental abilities and gives them the power to change other people’s minds, as well as access their thoughts and dreams.

The mind stone is like a company’s CRM (customer relationship management) strategy.

Like the mind stone, a solid CRM strategy will both enhance the way your team thinks about marketing and help change the minds of potential customers, allowing you to turn cold leads into sales.

How can a CRM change a customer’s mind?

Well, it’s all about knowing your customer. And not in a general way, anyone with a little effort can do that.

Once you really know your customer and how they think, you can construct your marketing in a way that you know will persuade them.

Great CRM strategies benefit from knowing as much as possible about each customer:

What makes them unique? What are their concerns? How well do they know your brand, and where are they in your sales funnel?

Knowing these elements can enable your team to craft tailored messages for each one of your customers.

Not every single lead will be ready to convert when your sales team first calls them. They might need a little convincing or extra information.

This is another place where your CRM comes in.

Delivering unique custom messages to your customers, through whatever method you’re communicating with, will help you change your customers minds. . .

And you will feel like you have your very own mind stone.

Why it’s vital to your business’ dominance:

Without a CRM strategy, your team may have successful marketing campaigns, but those campaigns won’t quite pay the dividends your boss is looking for.

Enables the user to change or reverse time, including time travel.

The user can even trap others in endless loops of time.

Email marketing is the time stone.

The time stone can turn a dead-end lead into a sale.

Depending on how far back your data goes, a well-crafted and perfectly-timed email can be the deciding factor in a customer’s purchasing process.

With a little help from the mind stone (or CRM) you and your team can find just the right information a specific lead is looking for and clarify any issues they might have.

Some of us go through the painstaking process of buying email lists, only to get open rates that make you feel like a parent texting their kid at college.

Sure, you might get a nibble every once in a while, but the true power of email marketing comes from its lead nurturing capabilities.

Once you find where your leads are in your funnel, you can craft a unique message to catch them at just the right time, capturing a lead you’d once thought lost.

And that lead will be more open to the products or services you’re offering.

If you want to, you can combine this with the reality stone and use Google sponsored InMail to send emails to whoever you wish, even if they’ve never given you their email address.

Why it’s vital to your business’ dominance:

Email marketing isn’t just lists and spam mail, regardless of what naysayers may think.

The power behind email is that it lets you target your audience when and where they need it.

Scripted email automation, for example, lets you target shoppers who abandon their carts, or send promotional benefits on someone’s birthday.

The key to successful marketing is getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and email marketing is all about mastering time.

Allows the user to steal, control, manipulate and alter souls.

It also creates a pocket universe in which gathered souls reside.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the soul gem.

It allows you to control and manipulate your own soul.

Your website is the soul of your company, and you have complete control over how visitors and search engines view it.

It should tell visitors everything they need to know:

Who you are, what you do, and how you can help.

It should serve as the ultimate showcase your company’s character.

In today’s world, if your company doesn’t have a website, you might as well kiss your own soul goodbye.

But the most important aspect of your website is SEO.

For many customers, your website is the first time they interact with your business.

But first they have to find it.

You can have the best-designed website in your industry, but without SEO you will be wasting money.

What’s worse, if your competitor has a comprehensive SEO strategy, they may be drawing all the search engine traffic away from you.

The best reaction to this is to see what they’re doing – and do it 10 times better.

SEO is all about gaining insight into what works and doing it the best so that when someone links to content in your field, they’re linking to you.

Why it’s vital to your business’ dominance:

In most cases, your website’s organic keyword rankings in Google SERPs will often be your best and cheapest source of quality leads.

Once you start getting traffic, you can improve your SEO further.

When you know where visitors are coming from, you start to understand what is – and is not – working in your favor.

Think of the SERPs as the pocket dimension created by your soul stone:

Through effective use of SEO strategy, you can control that universe so that anyone who wanders in will be under your control.

This stone allows the user to access and manipulate all energy and enhance their strength and durability.

In digital marketing the only idea that accurately represents the power stone is analytics.

Combined with the other stones, analytics will make your marketing unstoppable.

Whether you’re analyzing traffic from your SEO strategy or tracking lead generation from your paid search, data analytics are your key to limitless power:

With analytics, you can take your marketing efforts to the next level and dominate the galaxy your industry niche!

Any good campaign is backed by data, and that’s why it performs well. Data means anything from qualitative market research to quantitative tracked statistics on your social media ads.

Perhaps, while looking through your data, you find that a keyword you’re bidding on is proving to be a money sink with no return.

Analytics help you find this poor performing keyword and test a better one.

Looking at your analytics, you might find that most of your customers are in a certain age group.

Using this data, you can fine-tune a campaign towards that group, capturing more leads with a unique appeal to your audience.

Each of the ad platforms has their own analytics interface – such as Google Analytics – which allows you to gauge your campaign’s performance on that platform.

By mastering these tools, you can master digital marketing.

Why it’s vital to your business’ dominance:

Understanding what does and does not work means the difference between success and failure in business.

Think about it:

If your strategy isn’t working, and you don’t have any data, it becomes that much harder to adjust your strategy.

Tracking the right information is how you adapt to the rapid changes in the business world.

Good data enhances the power of your other marketing efforts – and together, you become truly unstoppable…

In order to use every stone together, the user needs cohesion — they need the gauntlet.

To successfully combine these digital marketing elements, you need a digital strategy.

The separate components of digital marketing are powerful, but they’re useless without a wider strategy to coordinate the different moving parts.

Remember that the stones, the marketing channels, are still subject to the wielder’s own competence.

The gauntlet wielder matters.

Even if you have all the stones, you still need to be strong enough on your own to use them effectively.

Marketing without sales, without communication between sales, or without direction can be a problem. You still need to be able to employ these methods.

To return to the extended Marvel metaphor:

Thanos doesn’t care about the power gem any more than as a means to an end. His goal is to destroy half of all life in the universe, and these stones are tools for him to accomplish that effectively.

(This is probably a good time to stop comparing business strategy to the destruction of all life.)

It’s easy to get caught up in one of the marketing channels (like how cool the time stone email marketing is).

But if you allow yourself to, you will lose sight of the bigger picture, which is your business goal.

Why it’s vital to your business’ dominance:

Collecting the infinity stones of digital marketing isn’t easy, but the effort you put in will pay enormous dividends.

Not all of us are heroes or villains from the Marvel universe, but we can each do our part to collect the six stones for ourselves and achieve infinite (marketing) power.

Fun isn’t something one considers when balancing the universe marketing. But this. . . does put a smile on my face.

Thanos -Spencer Tanase

What do you think the six infinity stones of digital marketing are? Do you agree with our choices? Leave a comment below and let us know!