The Other Side of the Glass

At Digital Marketing's core are the human beings on the other side of the glass that make decisions. The humans who don't work for your company, don't speak your acronym soup and who don't particularly care to understand how your business is organized. Outward projectiles from your organizational construct influenced by the best of intentions, politics and internal silos and jargon often confuse or frustrate them. They have a pain, short term need/desire or otherwise are motivated to seek out an answer and your goal is to be available to engage those humans where, when and how they prefer. Not the other way around.

Note that I did not say prospect, customer, cohort, persona or any other fancy marketing term that most modern marketing practitioners apply to the artistic bit of marketing. Why? Because at the end of the day what matters most is how that human being is engaging with your organization in the heat of the moment. All bets are off, no matter how that human got to this point in their buyer's journey or why. Fickle lot these humans - they just want what they want when they want it. They want it entertaining, meaningful, informative, understandable and they want what they want right now when it's convenient for them. And it doesn't matter if it's the first or fifth engagement with your company.

It's an Ecosystem

One key to success on your journey to digital marketing transformation is to assess the health of your marketing ecosystem, or to have 'ecosystem' in your lexicon the first place. I like to define a marketing ecosystem as the sum of all parts, with interdependencies upon one another, and to realize that there are consequences for over/under investing therein in any given piece of the puzzle. Think 'a butterfly beats its wings in Zimbabwe, a hurricane forms in the Atlantic.' kinda thing.

Taking it a layer deeper, if 'M' marketing is a living breathing ecosystem then the lungs are the digital ecosystem. Imagine a Venn diagram with Digital and Marketing overlapping. A symbiotic relationship exists and yet each Marketing organ is unique in the body of your organization. The thing about Marketing ecosystems is that in order for one to flourish, all the connected bits need nourishment or pieces will wilt and die just like that houseplant you own. You know, the cactus you bought thinking 'even I can't kill that, it hardly ever needs water.' yet you did kill it because you forgot it existed and never watered it.

In order for your digital ecosystem to exist it needs things at a minimum such as a web presence, social media and paid media channels, organic search, analytics, a robust set of platforms and infrastructure (ABM, CRM, DAM, integrated into a Demand Cloud if you will) to bring it all to life. And it goes without saying that you need the resources - both human and financial - to curate, cultivate and power it all.

The challenge and harsh reality comes when scrutinizing the actual performance of each mechanism within your ecosystem to discover just how well each of these are physically performing and how well they are contributing to the core business goals and objectives that you're driving towards. Some may be underwhelming to you as they may have been neglected for a long time, may be just a new capability or perhaps the talent you have isn't the right talent to deliver the needed results. Or maybe you don't have the right/current/fully utilized platforms to leverage. Years of budget cuts, doing more with less starts to take a toll after a while. All of which can be solved for with the right focus, mentoring and strategic investments.

What sorts of investments matter though when considering a digital ecosystem? Take a not-so-simple element like your web presence. Is it a contemporary, mobile friendly, organically endowed, built for speed, localized, instrumented with analytics? How about the forms? Are there people on your team that regularly review the analytics to understand what's working and what is not? How about testing, focus groups, CTAs, etc.?

I'm not covering it all but you get my drift, there's a lot more than meets the eye (content for example, I'll get to that in a moment). The investment needed to make it all work better, perhaps the most important investment to consider making, is in regard to your talent.

Talent Makes or Breaks You

Digital doesn't live in a vacuum and needs 'air' to suck in and draw oxygen from. It's critical that Digital has access to 'M' marketing leadership and in turn, that Digital has visibility to the objectives of the business and the KPIs. Whomever is running your digital ship in only the start. And it goes without saying that your digital ship Captain(s) can't be solely versed in the tech stack or how to drive the effective use of one digital organ or another (unless you're an 'm' marketing company in which case you are only focused on the short term anyway).

Digital leadership needs to be made up of business & strategy leaders who are tuned into those KPIs and the leadership teams even beyond the Marketing borders. Ideally, in an 'M' marketing world the Digital team is involved way before a product is launched or even named capitalizing on all the tricks of their trade to inform strategies, customer insights, competitive lenses and more. If you just think about the plethora of data available to an empowered digital team throughout the ecosystem, you can see why this is potentially a differential advantage for a business that embraces their digital team early and often.

It's equally important to consider the practitioners on your team and your trusted agency partners. They need to be regularly exposed to the business KPIs, Marketing KPIs and Digital KPIs but also need empowered to make the decisions that they were hired for in the first place. This doesn't mean you let things meander along willy-nilly of course. However, it does mean that if you pay professionals to do the job, that you enable and empower them to be successful. And that also includes listening to them when they ask for certain tools, platform upgrades or other capabilities. Platforms and tools are pencils and pens to a digital practitioner. A pencil that's heavily chewed on without an eraser and a dull point is not effective or comfortable to hold.

And a last thought on talent. Many organizations undertaking a digital marketing transformation have long neglected appropriate investment levels in their people. Yet it's these people that have worked countless hours, not taken vacations, have gone above and beyond too many times to count. Why? Because the vast majority of them are good, passionate, bright and dedicated to the cause, to their leadership, or both. So when it comes time to embrace digital more intentionally, be sure to consider things like training and professional development. It'll not only pay dividends for your business results, but will also improve the chances of longer term employee retention. Because if you don't love your employees, someone else will.

Content

Would you park your car in your kitchen, or put your dishwasher in your bedroom? Of course not, unless your are particularly eccentric. So why then do so many organizations take content authored for one purpose and try to jam it where it doesn't belong? Think about a staple of B2B marketing, the white paper. They are created from the outset to help your company to position a key idea or concept in its fullest length form.

Chock full of inputs from across the business which your content resources have dutifully distilled; those carefully scrutinized words, photos and diagrams become something that tells everyone reading it that the company who authored it and the solution itself is so compelling that they need to take action right now. And if those pesky humans didn't 'get it' the first time then they can always read it again. Or, a salesperson or other organization expert can walk the prospect through the concepts while leveraging other props like a Powerpoint to land key points in an effort to advance the sales cycle.

As wonderful as this asset may be, the actual words and images in it were not designed for your digital ecosystem as tempting and convenient as that may be. Websites have particular formatting and resolution requirements that vary quite a bit from the formats and resolution available to you for a white paper. These requirements also impact how things like photographs are selected to surface. Using photos that were shot at different times, with different lighting and angles when displayed on a webpage can look like a silverware drawer. Yes, they are all forks, knives and spoons but do they belong to the same set and look good on your Thanksgiving table? And to add to the entertainment value regarding copy that worked fine in a whitepaper, no longer works for a webpage as copy there needs to be very concise, compelling and and user-centric while being structured to 'hunt' for organic search over the long haul.

Users also have different expectations when they visit your website. On a webpage you simply don't have the same luxuries of space, time and format. In fact, you have mere seconds to get someone understand your story and to take an action. So, the story you've had 20 pages to tell in a whitepaper needs to be relayed differently and supplemented with visually engaging interactive elements like infograms, animations or via videos - all created explicit for the purpose of sharing it on the website. You are still charged with relaying an engaging story, it's just a different medium with different rules of engagement than your team may be used to crafting content for and needs to all come together in seconds.

Agile is More than Moving Quickly

In a digital marketing transformation a key consideration is your team's working methodology. You may have access to all the KPIs and the vision, you may have elevated the team's visibility and reputation across your business. However, how you organize the team and inform the backlog of work they are focusing on needs to be robust, flexible, transparent, and because we're talking digital marketing - quick.

Scrum Agile is a great way to deliver incremental, demonstrable value to the business. This is true even if your digital team is the only one practicing it and even if you don't have the ability to implement every aspect of a full blown scrum agile team. If you're not familiar with the details as to what Scrum Agile is, I recommend checking out the Scrum Alliance as a first stop.

Your digital marketing team is charged with lots of asks and to-dos. Long term 'gee this would be great ifs' and 'my hair is on fire I need this tomorrows'. Scrum Agile allows a small team to take in those requests, puts them in a sensical order based on the needs of the business, prioritize them bi-weekly with very definitive start and end dates all of which is tempered by the capacity of your team. And the body of work changes bi-weekly while you deliver incremental slices of happiness to your end-users along the way.

It serves as a forcing function for your business to manage up the executive food chain and manage down/across to the stakeholders whom you're making commitments to. Think of it this way - your digital team only has so much capacity every two weeks. Done well, the two week time-box represents agreed upon or well understood priorities and you can more readily predict about how long it will take to deliver that project du jour. In turn, if a new hot priority comes flying in from above you can very quickly collaborate with your key stakeholder or sponsor to have the conversation around 'if we start this next sprint, we are agreeing that we will have to de-scope these other items which we were planning for.'

It also is a good way to reflect upon the priorities in general - do you really really need this next week and is it more important than this other item your hair was on fire for last week? It's a little micro-ecosystem for workload, a check and balance system if you will that has great flexibility, transparency and the underlying discipline of a methods to ensure you're not just creating chaos. With agile, you have a shot at managing it and the expectations of the different stakeholders you serve.

Digital Data and Analytics in the Driver's Seat

Ecosystem thinking, Content Crafted for Digital, Investments in Talent and Agile Methods are all great, but all less powerful without your organization embracing the data which is contained within your digital ecosystem. You've heard this a bunch of times no doubt. But it's worth mentioning that without instrumenting your ecosystem with diagnostic and, what I refer to as higher level 'core' KPIs you're dead on arrival. And if you've instrumented your ecosystem like it's going out of style but you don't have anyone to understand and interpret and take action on the insights that data is providing you're just wasting your time. Worse, you aren't helping the business to achieve its strategic (things like mindshare and marketshare) and tactical goals (leads, pipeline, etc.).

One example is think about what a social media listening capability can bring to the table. It can tell you where the human beings that you are focusing on hang out, what content resonates with them and what doesn't, what content drives lead creation and pipe and doesn't, whether or not your content and messaging is being shared, the sentiment of users, who the biggest influencers are, location, product feedback and more. All these wonderful signals are useless unless someone spends the time to understand and interpret the information and in turn, to drive action within the business as a result.

What if your social media signals are indicating that beta customers are unhappy with the installation process for your product? What if key influencers are asking opinions about working with your company vs. key competitors? What if one of your employees starts to share questionable content? What if your social media channels have low engagement or something is skyrocketing? Taking the time to listen, to determine if it's a blip on the radar or a slow upward positive or negative trend matters and should feed into how your company makes decisions.

There are tons of other examples out there about how to mine digital data, to combine it with other data sets across platforms and to realize the benefits. If you think about one of the hottest acronyms out there today - ABM (Account Based Marketing) it totally needs data and from various systems to inform and surface the end-user experiences and targeted sales actions therein. Not to mention the Rubik's Cube of content that's needed to bring it all to life. Perhaps I'll explore some other examples in a future article.

A Long Winding Road

There's a lot of untapped potential in many businesses that could mean the difference between a company that survives and one that thrives - if digital marketing data and the ecosystem which supports it is properly curated, nurtured and invested in. It takes the right platforms, instrumentation, integrations and talent to bring it all to life so it has meaning - not to mention the support of your executive team. And last but not least it takes a bit of institutional 'intestinal fortitude' as the journey to a fully realized digital marketing transformation is just that, a journey, which will inevitably not be a straight line. You'll make mistakes - but heck, that's where the fun is. And at the end of the day that's what it is all about.