Gaps in confidence about measurement, creative execution, and customer response management. Marketers are also unsure about personalization and targeting and have a hard time with eCommerce.
Digital is an acquired skill, learned on the job and from colleagues. Most organizations need help navigating the ever changing digital landscape.
They are some of the findings in a recent survey by Adobe#:
- Marketers are not confident in their digital ability. Only 48% of digital marketers feel highly proficient in digital marketing.
- Marketers have low confidence in their companies’ marketing performance. Only 40% think their company’s marketing is effective.
- Sixty-eight percent of marketing professionals feel more pressured to show return on investment on marketing spend.
- Most digital marketers don’t have formal training; 82% learn on the job.
- Only 9% of respondents strongly agree with the statement “I know our digital marketing is working.”
Lack of confidence translates into inconsistent execution, lower budgets, and weak business performance. For most companies, digital marketing approaches are in a constant trial and error cycle.
And while 60% of marketers expect their companies to invest in digital marketing technology in the next year, they are not meeting that investment with the necessary confidence in their strategizing and planning.
Digital at the Core
Rather than just being a line item on a list of tactics, digital has created opportunities for companies and brands to go direct and, learning from the early examples of retail commerce, get to know their customers, in some cases for the very first time.
Because of the broad adoption of smartphones and tablets by customers, behavior is blurring the line between digital and in store. The direct nature of digital is blurring another line between media and brands, affording preference for businesses that focus on creating value.
That means a brand becomes meaningful when the direct interaction makes the customer's life more enjoyable, simpler, better, and so on. To operate with digital at the core organizations will need to identify what matters, what change is needed, and what to do first, second, third, and so on.
It also means they need to start thinking differently about technology. Like eCommerce and social, technology is a horizontal competence.
How do those who build great organizations think differently about technology? Several marketing organizations are beginning to net results from their collaboration with IT. The companies that have managed the convergence of IT and marketing well are building capacity to:
- create digital advantage in speeding up deliverables - Customer experience is a major component of the brand. Marketing owns it, and now requires information like customer feedback, analytics, and social activity to manage it well
- prototype, test, iterate the social experience -- creating an initial minimum viable product gets an organization in the game and takes it beyond dabbling to purposeful involvement to drive positive results through optimizing productivity
- transform how it does business -- helping them rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture
The future of social reflects the transformation with digital at the core.
Rather than merely trying to reach their customers, marketers have at their disposal the ability to help their customers express themselves. This doesn't happen by magic, or by trying a bunch of things and see what sticks. It happens by design, on purpose.
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.