Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success
Are you ready to support marketing in a digital world with new technologies and IT skillsets?
Member 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
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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.
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Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success Storyboard
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Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success Storyboard
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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.
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Digital Marketing Capability Builder Tool
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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.
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Digital Marketing Communication Deck
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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.
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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.
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