How Do We Strategise Digital Marketing Growth

We live in a world where you get offers to complete your websites in one day or one hour even. Have you ever assessed the return from your one-day website? Or ever tried to explore the possibilities of how much a website can contribute to your business. Do you know that digital marketing share of the total marketing expenditure has touched 30% and growing. This indicates the importance of creating a usable website for potential users. Something that understands the user behavior and responds to their needs.

We will discuss about the things we need to consider making a website with a purpose.

It is chaos out there. We see everybody is going digital with their marketing. And we think, we need to do the same as well. Unfortunately, we don’t know what we should do. So, we copy what others are doing. This is pretty much what is happening with everybody right now.

Yeah, if this is you then it’s all red flags for you.

How to identify red flags from green? The term digital marketing is maddeningly unhelpful these days. We have no clue weather we should invest in SEO or Content Marketing or Social Media. This is where we should start strategizing our digital marketing. Google and Boston Consulting Group has come up with a framework with which we can measure and strategise our digital marketing goals. This is termed as Digital Marketing Maturity.

What is Digital Marketing Maturity?

The concept is to measure where do you stand in digital marketing as such. Rather than valuating if we are using latest technology for marketing, it represents the quality of approach towards it. How optimal your recourses like people, operations and strategy are managed in digital marketing. To start measuring our digital marketing maturity, we will consider two broad aspects of it. Technical and Organisational

Technical aspects cover data, how it is connected, what are the actionable numbers and how much automated are we.

Organisational aspect is more of a human part of it. This includes skilled people, association with others, team building and co-ordination.

With the perfect combination of these aspects we will get through our digital marketing maturity.We need to evolve as a platform that takes data driven decisions about strategies and budget. And the same will help the C-suites see growth through a fact based frame.

To start with, we need to identify where our organisation stands in digital marketing. This will help us understand what we need to reach do to maturity level. And figure out gaps as well. According the BCG and google all organisations fall under one of the four stages, Nascent, Emerging, Connected and Multi Moment.

Nascent: New to digital marketing. Here the team size will be very small and no data for refences. No-coordination and no goals as well. Most of the companies falls here.

Emerging: Emerging organisations are those who start relaying on data. They have already gathered data from its nascent condition. Testing and finding out more about happens here. This a continuous improvement process.

Connected: Connected is where all the data gathered within each team department is shared and discussed and made it in such a way that it can be easily used for analysis. In this stage all tools are connected weather its online or offline.

Multi-moment: This stage is rarely achieved where whole online sales and marketing process is automised and can be tracked. Every customer interaction can be tracked and can be evaluated. Also on the marketing side the organisation will be able to give personalised experience for each customer.

How To Start Assessing Digital Marketing Strategy?

  • Start collecting data in your institution. Data includes social media handle numbers (posts, followers, engagement) Website numbers (visitors, enquiry) and paid ad numbers. This also includes how data is communicated through each department and how it is been assessed and used.
  • Categorise this data into two aspects. Technical and Organisational.

    Technical stuffs as discussed earlier includes the numbers and tools used for communication. Example: Performance of your Instagram handle. Followers, Engagement etc.

    Organisational aspects are like to whom do the data analyst communicate the data with. From where does the approval for changes to be done and how atomised is the scenario.
  • Once we have the data, we match it with the digital marketing maturity list to understand where do we stand. If we are only about data then we are Emerging and if are communicating enough as an organisation then we are Connected. But if we are only posting in Instagram and accumulating data, we fall in the Nascent stage.
  • Once we figure-out where we fit in, we need to find-out if have any gaps that we need to address. Take Organic Instagram Followers for an example. Do a competitive analysis to understand what are we missing. Also do a data study on your posts performance, hashtag, posting intervals etc, to understand what is the perfect approach.
    Same applies for communication in the organisation. Some decisions traditionally taken by the CFO or CEO has to be transferred to a Data Analyst or a Digital Marketing Specialist. Or C-Suits might need more insight about digital marketing and technology.

Challenges In Executing Marketing Strategy

Now the hard part. How to execute. This is not an easy process as we know. Co-ordination from C-suite to HR to data analyst is paramount. Rather than just populating content on internet, have a control over it. It is when the whole data is processed, communicated and discussed we will be able to measure or manage it.

How much human and how much tech dependency is a dangerous choice and is tricky. Identifying performance is best done with tech but improving it can be done with human. Connecting things can be automated but managing is always better when human hands are on it.

First of all we need to find out which stage we stand. As discussed above this is done by jotting down the current operational aspects. The first and last stages are easily identifiable. It takes time and effort to understand if we are connected enough to be called in the third stage or are we still in the emerging stage. Once this is done we need to find out the gaps in it and fill it.

If you are staring new it is always better to leave it to experts. It will be foolish to hire a Designer, Analyst, Content People and Mangers for this alone with least knowledge. Start with agents and consultants for help. Slowly build your team to suffice basic needs. Take technology help as much possible to generate numbers.

Last But Not The Least

Digital Marketing in very new compared to conventional marketing. Convectional marketing is there for ever and we know a work around for every scenario we face. But on the other hand, there are industries sill not explored digital marketing at all. And there is a big resistance from management side to study and understand new methods of marketing. We are ought to change as the whole world is evolving towards a new approach. The primary motto is to accept changes and work as a team. We will fail for sure in the process but we need to set long term vison and short term goals to understand and move forward.

Get ready to fail and start trusting numbers is the best way out of this trouble. Best of luck guys. Need any help let know.

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