The Anatomy of a Digital Marketing Strategist's Brain
Marketing is, ultimately, about saving cost, time, and money. It always has been. But, what is different is what effective marketing execution looks like. An effective digital marketing strategy, led typically by a digital marketing strategist, can provide many more prospects, leads, and clients than the alternative. And sales can only manage so many contacts on their own.
And yet, digital marketing strategy (and digital transformation) still seems to be this elusive mystery and challenging initiative for many industries and business organizations built before the internet. And it is for those organizations who aren't able to restructure their goals and priorities to the needs, no, the demands, of the customer instead of basing it on the pre-internet days of internal departmental constraints.
What's missing?
You need a holistic audit of the digital marketing strategist's brain to understand what it takes to support your needs online and reach your business’ goals.
The challenge for most organizations in marketing, particularly in digital marketing, is not execution. It is in solutioning too quickly with an emphasis on groupthink. You wouldn’t ask the operations team to give their opinion on how to sell, would you? And you wouldn’t ask the sales teams on how to create customer experience would you? And yet that’s what many sales-driven organizations are doing, at least the ones I've worked for. And so digital marketing and digital transformation end up costing way too much and not seeing the success they would have hoped. Success lies in the details.
Unfortunately the digital marketing strategy brain is complex and requires an experienced eye to understand. You need an expert in problem solving and digital marketing strategy to bring you out of this and to create synergy. The digital marketing brain requires an aptitude and focus on design/UX, information and site architecture, and front-end technologies. It requires both the left brain, creative ideation, and right brain, an analytical process-builder.
For most organizations, they try to piece digital marketing, user experience, and transformation altogether with many different skill sets and parts. They might be very successful in some tactics but very flawed, aka, a difficult user experience, in other areas.
The best digital marketing strategist sees strategy, analytics, and design as one unit and understands the key components of each of these disciplines. There is a story that is being told about your front-end systems through three key areas:
- User experience (UX) that should enhance your content strategy
- Functionality of how people engage with information across your platforms
- A unified brand through a digital design system
The effective digital marketing strategist understands this and can help steer the direction of all of these, align all three, or at minimum, should be a stakeholder in all three of these areas. Why should digital marketing strategists lead? Because they are the best situated to have a pulse on where your customers are engaging online. And this changes so quickly that they need to ensure that your systems, functionality and design are built with the right approach so that you can change on a dime.
Warning: Enter Sales Pitch
I'm Scott and I’m available for hire.
With an MBA and digital marketing and design experience, I can help put the pieces together. I help you focus on the right digital marketing priorities that lead to business value. Digital marketing effectiveness is in the details of goal planning, channel prioritization, execution, measurement setup, tracking, and reporting on the right metrics to glean insights. It impacts the whole digital infrastructure and requires consolidation of efforts to focus on the ideal customer.
You need an experienced digital marketing strategist, like me, a balanced left and right brained thinker. Creative and visual thinking meets analytical problem solver. Can you see me waving my hand? I’m calling out, “Hello, that’s me. Pick me.” I'm a value-oriented mediator between creative, business leadership, IT, marketing, analytics. technology, and operations.
I help small to medium sized marketing departments get focused on the right outcomes for digital marketing success. Any element of digital transformation execution without the right process and systems, plus clarity around constraints and opportunities, will cause problems and oversight in project implementation. It can create bottlenecks and bad outcomes that impede the customer’s experience of your brand online and will end up costing you millions.
In theory, digital marketing and user experience should be as simple as, put a ‘button’ right here on your website for visitors to contact us. In reality, it’s about strategically arranging content and information architecture in a way that is intuitive to a visitor to raise their hand, “Pick me!” Is what they should be saying. Keep in mind, this also includes structuring your content to be indexable and for web accessibility so that search engines and social can help put you in front of the customer.
This is about creating clarity with your website visitor and your online students searching for answers to their questions or even those in social looking at cats and dogs and then 'boom' they notice a compelling piece of content shared by their third removed uncle. It's about seemingly random connections, not so random after all. You direct people and tell them how you want them to engage with your content, as a whole. You need both past and future content structure and planning so everyone in your organization understands where content will live. Then the digital marketing strategist can give the visitor the correct set of experiences to know and measure the visitor's intentions. This is simple, but it’s not easy. Don’t solution too early on projects that you will regret and result in continuing to put bandaids on inefficient, costly marketing technology "solutions". Start with the customer, not with your internal systems and the brain will guide you to the right answer for all of your marketing problems.
As a teacher, I come alongside your team to help audit and provide recommendations to your existing marketing programs, train, and influence change at whatever speed you deem appropriate. You will benefit from my years of digital marketing experience, my network of solution providers, and yes, my digital marketing strategist brain.
I am very skilled at assessing problems in your existing digital marketing transformation and structure. I help create the right structure, processes, and systems to impact digital marketing success by focusing your organization on the right priorities.
See my digital marketing and design portfolio or contact me for a free consultation.
Note: Original post was on 1/7/20 and can be found here: https://scottwclifton.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-digital-marketing-strategist-brain/