Commentary

Digital Is More Than Just A Project

Achieving success with digital takes time and a focus on long-term objectives. It's not just something that can be plugged and played with offline efforts. The following are five things to consider when determining how your team and agency will deliver business impact digitally. Some of these suggestions may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised at the number of large-scale marketers that struggle with this every day.

Stop with the projects -- One-off projects are often managed in a silo, and tend to revolve around short flights with short-term objectives. In this scenario, insights may be limited and are typically confined to that silo, not leveraged across the organization properly (see "Leverage your Learnings" below).

Ensure that your agency is working closely with you on the development of strategic initiatives. They will be executing much of this and can act as a knowledge bridge across groups. If you aren't comfortable with their capabilities or strategic acumen, find someone you are comfortable with. It's an ongoing process, and requires a consultative and collaborative approach. And don't forget about internal teams--getting internal resources on board may be tough, but it makes accomplishing the other elements easier. Groups like IT, CRM, Business Intelligence, to name a few, all play a role in successes of the marketing team.

Start with the end in mind -- What metrics are key to the organization? Then take it down a level to marketing, then to media performance, and then digital. It can be hard metrics like sales, leads, or cost per unique shopping cart. You can also focus on brand metrics like awareness, shift in perception, or purchase intent. Whatever your metric, make sure it aligns with your core objective-- but more importantly, make sure it's actionable.

In addition, rank each metric in advance so you know what indicators hold the highest priority. For example, what value do you attribute to a "lift in purchase intent" versus an "actual sale completed"? This will help internal and external teams keep focus.

Lastly, understand the frequency in which you intend to monitor each metric. You want to ensure that you are seeing meaningful, statistically relevant data, but also provide time that allows for optimization that can impact the final outcome.

Develop your infrastructure -- Goals are great, but if you can't track and share performance it will be hard to collect that bonus check at the end of the year. I'm a proponent of ad-serving, page-tagging, ad effectiveness studies, call centers, sales data, and anything you would consider a response mechanism. It provides you with a variety of data points to start with. A plan may look good on paper, but there are so many variables affecting performance, your agency will need all of this data to determine how to react to in-market performance. The more buttons and levers you can give to an agency, the more effective they should be at hitting your goals. A company that dismisses the relevance of an integrated reporting and response infrastructure will struggle to make gains digitally.

Developing the infrastructure is an important first step, but it is also imperative that you maintain and ensure data integrity. There was a great article by Neil Mason that talked about getting the numbers right and the implications of flawed data. Reviewing the process surrounding the infrastructure can help reduce errors that lead to major headaches.

Leverage your learnings and collective knowledge -- Online media is an ever-evolving landscape, and while it continues to shift, make sure you aren't repeating tests, or worse, repeating miss-steps that were identified in previous campaigns. Also keep up on market developments, as they can sometimes have unintended implications. This is where you should be leveraging your agency and pushing for new insights that will keep you informed and keep your strategies and tactics fresh.

A great example of this happened recently with a client performing a post buy review. We were reviewing the performance of various sites and comparing it to a different campaign run through another group within their larger organization. We discovered a larger-than-usual decline on the CTR for one. The client assumed that the messaging strategy was misaligned. However, because we had managed both campaigns, we were able to share that while creative performance was below average, the site had undergone a site redesign that increased the number of ad units on the page. This seems small, but had this occurred in a silo, this key insight would have gone unnoticed, and could have led to a shift in assumptions about the messaging strategy and site performance on a larger scale.

Develop a dashboard and monitor goals and metrics -- Working closely with your team (internal and external) to understand goals and objectives is key, but developing dashboards to see how your efforts map back to objectives is equally valuable. Monitor the health of a campaign as it progresses; this allows you to view and identify problem areas and take action before they drag down overall campaign performance.

Another valuable exercise is to periodically review metrics you hold as key, and look to see whether they are still the most valuable metrics to be watching. Have business goals shifted? Has the infrastructure evolved to provide more insightful data? Has your media strategy shifted, making certain metrics irrelevant? These are all questions that can be used to help maintain momentum and ensure that digital is driving your business.

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