Getting More Value from Digital Marketing
Both photos above courtesy of McKinsey Quarterly
While this article regarding finding value (and minimizing costs) in digital marketing efforts is aimed at consumer marketing professionals, there is good advice for industrial marketers as well (as remember, at the end of the day, it is still a person making the decision on who to buy from, and whether to buy at all). What stands out is the (relatively) small amount of improvement necessary in each step of the end-to-end experience (Exhibit 1) to see significant gains. We are not talking "best-in-class" performance here, and even just some focus on your selling process can reap benefits quickly. I also love the "supply chain" model (Exhibit 2) for content management, with the emphasis on managing it as an asset for which you have incurred some cost in creating. This leads to an ROA (return on assets) mentality that naturally points out opportunities to reuse or re-channel this valuable content. Such content creation and management does necessitate an increase in marketing resources, but since you are (hopefully) already recognizing savings from cutting back on traditional media approaches, the resources are there to re-deploy.
