Five Ways to Get More Value through Marketing in a Digital World

“Companies that make the deep strategic, organizational, and operational shifts required to become effective digital marketers can become more agile, more productive, and accelerate revenue growth.”

  - McKinsey & Company

With all of the latest buzz around digital marketing and the importance of diving in and riding the digital wave to bigger and better opportunities, I decided to do some research on how I can make a difference.

After reading “The Network is Your Customer: Five Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age” by David Rogers, executive director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School, I found that everyone, working separate yet together, can bring value to their organization. Although this book is several years old, the theories are still very relevant today. It examines how digital technologies — from smartphones to social networks — connect us in networks that transform our relationships to businesses and each other.

As we all know, from the very beginning, marketers have regarded the internet as a massive laboratory, launching experiment after experiment to crack the code that generates sales and customer loyalty with modest results. Consumers have been adopting digital technology at their own pace and as they saw fit, in the process fundamentally altering the way they make purchasing decisions.¹ 

Talented marketers for instance, know they can have a positive impact and overall success of their messaging, if they work together and team up in the development of a targeted digital strategy and implement it through all resources available to them.  

There are five strategies that came out of the research conducted through examining hundreds of case studies of businesses of all kinds, trying to understand what makes a successful digital strategy, they are:

1. The Access Strategy: Be faster, be easier, be everywhere, be always on


2. The Engage Strategy: Become a source of valued content


3. The Customize Strategy: Make your offering adaptable to your customers' needs


4. The Connect Strategy: Become a part of your customers' conversations


5. The Collaborate Strategy: Invite your customers to help build your enterprise

These five strategies were identified by examining the core behaviors of customers in their networked lives. While technology keeps shifting every day, the underlying behaviors that drive customers in the online world remain constant. So, they present a huge opportunity for businesses to innovate, and to retain and win new customers. Rather than focusing on new technologies and tools for marketing to your target audience, marketing teams need to rethink their understanding of their core customers from their point of views.

According to Stephanie Chandler, Forbes contributor and author of “Own Your Niche”, while many business and marketing departments are working to justify the cost and time investment for developing and managing a successful social media marketing strategy, “an important benefit often gets overlooked: Big Wins”. For example, if someone from LinkedIn connects you with a significant executive that has a project and budget, then that would certainly qualify as a Big Win. If a major media outlet finds you on Twitter and conducts an interview for a national article, then that is also a Big Win, just one that you can’t measure based on revenues directly generated.

Big Wins don’t happen often, but when they do, they make it all worthwhile. It’s easy to forget results like these six months down the road when you’re trying to assess whether your social media efforts are paying off. But that one large sale could cover your social media marketing costs for years. And that major media interview could lead to subsequent interviews and create additional executive awareness three years from now.

So, whether you’ve just started to create a digital marketing strategy or have been implementing one for a while now, make sure you monitor your efforts by tracking results on a regular basis. If you do this diligently you’ll be able to tweak your messaging based on the data that’s derived from your assessments.

Do you have more suggestions on how to get increased success in the digital world? Please feel free to make a comment here or let me know since I would love to hear your ideas!

Planning a Marketing Ideation Session

 

 What is an Ideation Session?

What used to be called a “brainstorming” session has now morphed into an “ideation” session. It’s actually more than just simply changing a word that seems overused, but actually taking it to the next level. Where a brainstorming session is getting a group together to throw out new ideas and ways of approaching or tackling something in a different and innovative way to achieve a specific goal, an ideation session is much more. It’s an actual process where an idea is identified and then built upon to achieve a specific solution to a specific problem, rather than just a group of people tossing out ideas hoping they will be picked up and accepted by the group.

For example, a brainstorming session would be something like this –
 

Where an ideation session has more planned directives –

While contemplating hosting a group of colleagues for an internal Marketing Ideation Session or Workshop, I decided that the initial step would be to develop the reasons why this would be beneficial and the goals we are striving to achieve.

First, realizing that there is a direct correlation between the quantity of good planning and preparation and quality of output, we must identify the specific problem we would like to find a solution for as well as the essence of the problem prior to our initial meeting if we want to achieve success. 

We must also create a structure for the following:

• Identify participants according to focus area
• Agree on the problem that each would like to bring to the group
• Establish each stakeholder’s engagement for contributing
• Set timeframes for completion of process from implementation of idea to follow up and final outcome report

Only after all of the above points are successfully identified and processed will the group realize whether or not the ideation session was successful. However an unsuccessful result does not mean that the idea that was implemented was necessarily wrong since there are many uncontrolled variables that may occur during the process.

For example, if you’re dealing with a communication problem between sales and marketing that needs to be addressed, developing a solution to the problem may be to request the sales team assist you in solving this issue. However, if members of either team do not decide on working together and do not follow a developed process, the chances of success are low even though the initial idea for the solution was well thought out and considered to be a good one.

A brainstorming session usually leads to everyone going their separate ways after coming together to share ideas. It’s like throwing everything at the wall hoping something will stick; whereas having a formulated plan, process and follow through has a much greater chance of success.

There are no guarantees that the ideation session will garner positive results, but by working together to first identify the problem that needs to be solved and then continuing to work together as a unit for a solution, the odds are better since everyone is on the same page.