3 Ways to Advance Digital Marketing in Your Organization

Digital marketing, with its constant changes and new technologies emerging regularly, is oftentimes a huge initiative to implement for many companies. While some organizations hopped on board early, making the necessary investments in people, technology, and creative thinkers needed to make digital marketing a central part of their go-to-market strategy, others lag behind their industry peers. If you fall into the latter category – or even if you’re just trying to make digital marketing a more integral part of your organization – check out my three tips to help your initiatives gain momentum within your company below:

1. Brief Executives on What Is Possible.

Executives can be your biggest source of momentum for digital marketing. However, before they give you their full endorsement – along with budget and headcount – they have to fully understand the benefits that digital marketing will bring your company.

To ensure you receive their commitment, consider sharing case studies provided by your software vendors or those found in online content searches. Try to include competitive examples of how your industry peers and competitors are deploying digital marketing technology. Also, be sure to include statistics and findings from reports like the IBM Global CMO Study, which will give your executives digestible insight into what their counterparts are doing and thinking. You’ll also need to be prepared to share specific digital marketing programs that you think will help drive revenue and increase customer loyalty. If you’re successful, you might just find a strong ally in the C-suite for what you need to do!

2. Educate Teams Outside of the Marketing Department.

Folks outside of your organization are most likely interested in how your marketing initiatives are affecting the company’s bottom line. To provide some insight for them, consider scheduling things like lunch and learns to educate both your peers and leaders of other departments. You might even be able to get them on board enough that they end up contributing content! Or, at the least, they will be more aware of how their schedules can impact what you’re trying to achieve with your digital marketing efforts and be more sympathetic to your needs and accelerated schedule. They may even be able to come up with some interesting ideas for how you can “program-ize” an initiative.

3. Rally Around a New Program.

One of the greatest benefits of marketing automation technology is that it gives you the ability to do rule-based communications, allowing you to break out of the manual methods used to segment, query, prepare, and execute traditional email campaigns. While automated programs greatly increase your efficiency and effectiveness, they do not necessarily raise the profile of the transformation that you are undertaking within your marketing team.

However, one of the biggest benefits of a distinct program is that it typically allows you to easily measure program investment and ROI. These programs typically direct customers or prospects to a particular area of your website or a landing page where you gain more information about their specific needs. You’ll then follow up with helpful automated content either in the form of a report or series of helpful content spaced out over days or weeks.

These tips are just a few of the ways you can advance digital marketing in your company to provide the awesome experience your customers deserve. However, there is always more to learn, both from industry experts and your marketing peers.

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