1. Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success
Are you ready to support marketing in a digital world with new technologies and IT skillsets?
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2. Introduction
Digital marketing technology adoption has exploded, increasing marketing budgets and campaign frequency. IT must prepare for digital marketing requirements by improving digital marketing technology, processes, and human capital.
This Research Is Designed For:
This Research Will Help You:
CIOs, Application Directors, Integration Specialists, and Application Developers that support digital marketing campaign development and execution.
CEOs, CIOs, CMOs, and Marketing VPs that want to improve IT’s perception as a Marketing partner, rather than just a service provider.
Small-large private and public organizations with a mostly B2C or G2C market orientation. However, digital marketing can also benefit B2B value chains if very precise digital channel analyses indicate prospect affinity for specific digital channels.
Establish a repeatable framework to:
Understand the digital marketing landscape and the opportunities for your organization presented by various channels.
Improve collaboration between Marketing and IT by facilitating discussion and consensus about digital marketing priorities.
Establish a prioritized list of digital channels most likely to provide benefit to the organization’s top product/segment pairings.
Translate prioritized digital channels into discrete capabilities that IT needs to build in order to provide digital marketing leadership.
Create a roadmap for channel enablement with the people, process, and technology capabilities to succeed.
Go beyond migration to digital channels and transform the organization with digital marketing analytics to do new things in new ways for new segments.

3. Executive Summary The Situation:
Investment in digital marketing technology has exploded as consumers flock to digital channels such as , social networking, video, photo, and mobile apps. IT has less time than ever to become a strategic partner with product marketing groups as they migrate to digital channels.
The Solution:
Identify and understand the digital marketing channels that can benefit your organization.
Get stakeholder buy-in to facilitate collaboration between IT and product marketing groups to identify necessary IT capabilities.
Build IT capability by purchasing software, outsourcing, and training or hiring individuals with necessary skillsets.
Become transformational: use IT capabilities to support analytics that identify new customer segments, key influencers, and other invaluable insights.
Info-Tech Insights:
Time is of the essence! It is easier to begin strengthening the relationship between marketing and IT today than it will be at any point in the future.
Being transformational means more than just enabling the channels marketing wants to pursue; IT must assist in identifying new segments and digital marketing opportunities, such as enabling influencer management.

4. Info-Tech is ready to assist. Book a free guided implementation today!
Book a Guided Implementation Today: Info-Tech is just a phone call away and can assist you with your project. Our expert Analysts can guide you to successful project completion. For most members, this service is available at no additional cost.*
Here are the suggested Guided Implementation points in the Build IT Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing Success project:
Section 3: Mobilize for Action: Get Stakeholder Buy-in to Get the Right People to the Table
Get everyone necessary in the same room. The purpose of this GI call is to assist in stakeholder identification and to discuss the best ways to communicate with each stakeholder.
Section 4: Identify Your Product-Specific Digital Marketing Mix to Prioritize Digital Channels and Capabilities
Make a plan that is product and segment specific. The purpose of this GI call is to discuss how digital marketing trends may affect channel reach, necessitating changes in the future.
Section 5: Create a Roadmap for Building Capabilities to Enable Digital Marketing
Develop a plan for enabling digital marketing capabilities. The purpose of this GI call is to discuss capability building options and provide resources such as RFPs to assist in procurement or outsourcing.
Appendix: Become Truly Transformational: Leverage Analytics to Capitalize on New Opportunities
Identify new opportunities. The purpose of this GI call is to discuss best practices for data management and analytics.
*Guided Implementations are included in most advisory membership seats.

5. Workshop Schedule Identify digital marketing opportunities
Identify your product-specific digital marketing landscape
Enable digital marketing capabilities and leverage analytics
Understand digital marketing challenges
Assess each channel’s reach within target markets
Identify capability gaps
Determine the digital channels valuable to your organization
Check each channel’s fit for your products and services
Understand your options
Identify missed opportunities and wasted resources
Prioritize digital channels
Create a capability building roadmap
Day 1
Brainstorm creative ways to pursue valuable channels
Identify high priority capabilities
Brainstorm ways to exploit advanced analytics
Day 2
Day 3

6. Make the Case for Building IT Capabilities
Identify digital marketing opportunities
Mobilize for action: get stakeholder buy-in
Identify your product-specific digital marketing landscape
Create a roadmap for building capabilities
Appendix
Identify the symptoms of inadequate IT support of digital marketing to diagnose the problems in your organization.
Recognize the risks of inaction to understand why action must be taken.
Understand what a truly transformational model looks like to use the model as a benchmark for evaluating your digital marketing success.

7. Symptoms of failure Do these concerns sound familiar?
Not enough time to adapt:
Web 2.0 channels are more complex, reach a far greater audience, and are being adopted by buyers much faster than Web 1.0 technologies of the late 1990s.
Poor understanding of requirements:
Marketing is demanding the latest and greatest technology, but hasn’t translated that to specific IT requirements well.
Need for constant IT involvement:
IT is constantly custom coding on existing and web marketing campaigns and data integration points require regular maintenance.
Big data, and just more of it:
The organization is too worried about capturing big data in warehouses rather than analyzing it and extracting valuable insights for marketing.
Lack of marketing internal alignment:
Requests by marketing groups are often for redundant, unproven, and difficult to integrate technologies. It is difficult for IT to build capabilities for multiple, unaligned digital marketing initiatives.
If your organization is feeling these symptoms, then your IT department may lack the capabilities it needs to support digital marketing. This blueprint can help.

8. Prognosis What will happen if you don’t take action? Misalignment:
Even if IT builds the capabilities to pursue digital channels, the channels will underperform in realizing organizational goals if the channels and the goals are misaligned. Just because everyone has heard of Facebook does not mean Facebook is always the answer.
Missed opportunity:
Building pages for search engine marketing and social media requires proficiency with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. If IT does not develop the capabilities to support these channels, then lead generation, brand promotion, and engagement opportunities will be lost.
Ineffective analytics:
Leveraging analytics to identify new opportunities is highly dependent on IT supporting the necessary integration for robust analytic capabilities. Failure to integrate and analyze new data will undermine organizational success in influencer and sentiment identification.
Lack of control:
Marketing is developing and depending on internal power users and agencies. This practice can isolate IT from digital marketing technology decision making. However, IT will still be needed for integration and technical capabilities, so a lack of involvement in decision making will result in decreased control over IT resource allocation and detract from partner perception of IT.
IT must move quickly to ensure that marketing is adequately supported as it migrates to digital channels. This blueprint can help.

9. What does a truly transformational organization look like?
We need to ask what an organization that is 100% capable of supporting digital marketing would look like. It would not only be a strategic partner, but also a transformational leader that drives digital marketing in new directions.
IT is a strategic partner throughout channel migration:
IT is involved in decision making and has a complete understanding of the digital channels the organization is going to migrate to or phase out if unused.
IT has the necessary capabilities to support and enable success in all relevant digital channel management technologies.
Migrate
IT is a leader in transforming digital marketing:
IT is a key player in ensuring that all relevant data from new digital channels is managed and analyzed in order to maintain a 360 degree view of customers and feed real-time campaigns.
This enables the organization to not only target existing segments effectively, but also to identify and pursue new opportunities not presented before. These opportunities include: identifying new segments among social networks, identifying key influencers as a new target, and identifying proactive service and marketing opportunities from the public social cloud.
Transform

10. Clarify the digital marketing landscape to understand the scope of this blueprint
Digital Marketing is a broad category of channels, technologies, services, and practices. This blueprint focuses primarily on the concepts below, but the framework and methodology can be used for an extended definition, including vertical industries.

11. Identify Digital Marketing Opportunities to Understand the Need for Action in Your Organization
Make the case
Identify digital marketing opportunities
Mobilize for action: get stakeholder buy-in
Identify your product-specific digital marketing landscape
Create a roadmap for building capabilities
Appendix
Understand how goals affect how channels fit into your organization to assess value.
Consider how organization size and business model affect digital channel fit and value.
Identify the untapped digital marketing value in your organization to understand where your organization needs to improve.

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