Preparing your company for digital marketing

With digital marketing moving into mainstream marketing, how can companies organize their marketing operations to drive maximum impact?

During initial meetings, we often ask our clients to define their objectives for their digital marketing efforts. Their replies are often broad and encompasses many areas:

• Enhance their websites
• Improve ranking in SEO
• Increase their engagements in social media like Facebook, Twitter
• Increase sales from their websites
• Increase customer engagement and loyalty from their digital assets

As businesses, you would hardly find this surprising. These are main areas that digital marketing should focus on according to many articles and research. However, to digital marketeers a simple timeline projection would reveal the following:

• Enhance their websites – 3 months
• Improve ranking in SEO – 6 months
• Increase their engagements in social media like Facebook, Twitter – 3 months
• Increase sales from their websites – 2 months
• Increase customer engagement and loyalty from their digital assets – 3 months

Unless companies are prepared to invest in teams of 4-5 digital marketeers, it is not difficult to figure that any results will only show in a year or more. In reality, most companies would have only 1-2 headcount for such positions. If the company is understaffed, this role would be undertaken in part by existing sales manager or marketing manager. In such cases, results will certainly take an even longer time.

To be successful in exploiting digital marketing to increase your competitiveness, businesses must be prepared. Make plans to hire and build a team of digital marketeers.

Roles of digital marketing team

Digital Marketing Training

Based on different competences and skills, here are some responsibilities that should be assigned to different professionals in the digital marketing team:

• Analytics and evaluation – research and analyze online traffic
• Strategy conceptualization and implementation – driver on overall digital strategy and marketing automation
• Content creation – design and supply content for owned / shared media
• Media/Campaign planning – management of paid media spend
• Social Media monitoring and engagement – engage customers on social networking sites

In reality, many companies may not have the budget to hire for all five roles at once. Even if you have to hire one person at a time, be mindful of the other roles that can help you to plan for expansion of the digital marketing team at the right time. Otherwise, your marketing team may become obsolete sooner than you think.

Meanwhile, companies must be aware of limitations of the one-man digital marketing team. By setting the right priorities, you can still make a difference on your digital marketing efforts. Companies can focus on one or two objectives defined earlier.

Digital Marketing Training of existing marketeers

As an alternative, develop digital marketeers by sending them for digital marketing training. Such training are readily available online and offline, and cover a wide range of topics.

It is recommended that the first course to be strategy-based. This will empower the marketeer with skills to analyze and make plans for future digital marketing efforts. It also helps the company in building a competent digital marketing team eventually. An example of such a course can be found here.