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Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success

Are you ready to support marketing in a digital world with new technologies and IT skillsets?

Client Challenge

  • Misalignment: Even if IT builds the capabilities to pursue digital channels, the channels will underperform in realizing organizational goals if the channels and the goals are misaligned.
  • Ineffective analytics: Failure to integrate and analyze new data will undermine organizational success in influencer and sentiment identification.
  • Missed opportunity: If IT does not develop the capabilities to support these channels, then lead generation, brand promotion, and engagement opportunities will be lost.
  • Lack of control: Marketing is developing and depending on internal power users and agencies. This practice can isolate IT from digital marketing technology decision making.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Identify and understand the digital marketing channels that can benefit your organization.
  • Get stakeholder buy-in to facilitate collaboration between IT and product marketing groups to identify necessary IT capabilities.
  • Build IT capability by purchasing software, outsourcing, and training or hiring individuals with necessary skillsets.
  • Become transformational: use IT capabilities to support analytics that identify new customer segments, key influencers, and other invaluable insights.
  • Time is of the essence! It is easier to begin strengthening the relationship between marketing and IT today then it will be at any point in the future.
  • Being transformational means more than just enabling the channels marketing wants to pursue; IT must assist in identifying new segments and digital marketing opportunities, such as enabling influencer management.

Impact and Result

  • IT is involved in decision making and has a complete understanding of the digital channels the organization is going to migrate to or phase out if unused.
  • IT has the necessary capabilities to support and enable success in all relevant digital channel management technologies.
  • IT is a key player in ensuring that all relevant data from new digital channels is managed and analyzed in order to maintain a 360 degree view of customers and feed real-time campaigns.
  • This enables the organization to not only target existing segments effectively, but also to identify and pursue new opportunities not presented before.
  • These opportunities include: identifying new segments among social networks, identifying key influencers as a new target, identifying proactive service and marketing opportunities from the public social cloud, and conducting new competitive analyses on the public social cloud.

Research & Tools

Name Actions

1. Make the case for building IT capabilities

Identify the symptoms of inadequate IT support of digital marketing to diagnose the problems in your organization.

Name Actions
Storyboard: Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success
Storyboard: Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success

2. Identify digital marketing opportunities to understand the need for action in your organization

Identify the untapped digital marketing value in your organization to understand where your organization needs to improve.

Name Actions
Digital Marketing Capability Builder Tool

3. Mobilize for action: get stakeholder buy-in

Develop a plan for communicating with stakeholders to ensure buy-in to the digital marketing capability building project.

Name Actions
Digital Marketing Communication Deck

4. Identify the product/segment-specific digital marketing landscape to identify required IT capabilities

Assess how well each digital channel reaches target segments. Identify the capabilities that must be built to enable digital channels.

Name Actions

5. Create a roadmap for building capabilities to enable digital marketing

Assess the people, processes, and technologies required to build required capabilities and determine the best fit with your organization.

Name Actions

Onsite Workshop: Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success

Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Do-It-Yourself Implementation

The slides in this Best Practice Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use.

Project Accelerator Workshop

You can also use this Best Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix.

Module 1: Identify Digital Marketing Opportunities

The Purpose

  • Determine the fit of each digital channel with your organizational goals.
  • Determine the fit of digital channels with your organizational structure and business model.
  • Compare the fit of digital channels with your organization’s current levels of use to:
    • Identify missed opportunities your organization should capitalize on.
    • Identify digital channels that your organization is wasting resources on.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • IT department achieves consensus around which opportunities need to be pursued.
  • Understanding that continuing to pursue excellent-fit digital channels that your organization is currently active on is a priority.
  • Identification of the channels that stopping activity on could free up resources for.

Activities Outputs
1.1 Define and prioritize organizational goals.
  • Prioritized list of organizational goals.
1.2 Assess digital channel fit with goals and organizational characteristics.
  • Assigned level of fit to digital channels.
1.3 Identify missed opportunities and wasted resources in your digital channel mix.
  • List of digital channels that represent missed opportunities or wasted resources.
1.4 Brainstorm creative ways to pursue untapped digital channels.
  • List of brainstormed ideas for pursuing digital channels.

Module 2: Identify Your Product-Specific Digital Marketing Landscape

The Purpose

  • Identify the digital channels that will be used for specific products and segments.
  • Identify the IT capabilities that must be built to enable digital channels.
  • Prioritize the list of IT capabilities.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • IT and marketing achieve consensus around which digital channels will be pursued for specific product-segment pairings.
  • Identification of the capabilities that IT must build.

Activities Outputs
2.1 Assess digital channel fit with specific products.
  • Documented channel fit with products.
2.2 Identify the digital usage patterns of target segments.
  • Documented channel usage by target segments.
2.3 Decide precisely which digital channels you will use to sell specific products to specific segments.
  • Listed digital channels that will be used for each product-segment pairing.
2.4 Identify and prioritize the IT capabilities that need to be built to succeed on each digital channel.
  • Listed and prioritized capabilities that must be built to enable success on necessary digital channels.

Module 3: Enable Digital Marketing Capabilities and Leverage Analytics

The Purpose

  • Identification of the best possible way to build IT capabilities for all channels.
  • Creation of a plan for leveraging transformational analytics to supercharge your digital marketing strategy.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • IT understanding of the costs and benefits of capability building options (people, process, and technology).
  • Information about how specific technology vendors could fit with your organization.
  • IT identification of opportunities to leverage transformational analytics in your organization.

Activities Outputs
3.1 Identify the gaps in your IT capabilities.
  • A list of IT capability gaps.
3.2 Evaluate options for building capabilities.
  • An action plan for capability building.
3.3 Identify opportunities for transformational analytics.
  • A plan for leveraging transformational analytics.