Ask Yourself These 5 Questions Before Going Digital

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Question [noun]: a sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit information — Google

In recent times, organizations are beginning to realize the impact of digital on the bottom line and are beginning a mad scramble to invest in the digital real estate. However, to take advantage of the benefits, organizations must know the process involved in adopting this platform.

If your organization is in the process of adopting digital marketing as a part of its strategy, then this article is for you. Whether your organization is B2B or B2C, the process of adopting digital technology is largely the same — you’ll have to answer the following questions before deciding if digital marketing is for your organization.

What is the objective?

The unique challenges of your organization determine the objectives you should set for digital marketing. Your objectives could range from increasing brand awareness to increasing market share. For your objectives to be effective, they have to be Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound (SMART)

What are the consumer insights?

What do you know about your customers? What digital platforms do they engage with? Are they online in the first place?These insights come from consumer data.

Getting the right insights requires correct analysis and interpretation of consumer data to reveal trends in behavior, geo-demographics, expectations and online consumption habits. This will help you determine the best approach for achieving your organizational objective(s).

Analytics, surveys and reports are excellent places to get these insights.

What role(s) will digital marketing play in achieving the objective?

It is important to identify how digital marketing will help your organization accomplish its objectives. This depends on two factors:

1. The stages of the consumer decision journey.
2. The type of organization: B2B or B2C.

Some of the roles that digital marketing may play in your organization include: Data gathering, Awareness, Facilitating consumer decision process, Engagement, Customer service, Reputation Management, Post-purchase services etc.

What digital tools should be employed?

Not every digital tool will be appropriate for your organization. Therefore, you must choose the digital tools and platforms that best meet your set objectives The digital tools to be employed depend on two key factors:

• The role to be played in achieving objectives.
• The type of organization.

For example, a B2B organization will likely require more of blogs and LinkedIn presence than a B2C company would. Likewise an objective to create engagement among consumers of a B2C product will likely rely on distributing content the social media platform its audience can be found on as opposed to an objective to increase awareness which will incorporate search ads and sponsored blog posts .

Questions to be answered at this stage include:

• Can my consumers be found on this digital platform?
• Can they be reached with this digital tool?
• Can the performance on this platform be measured?

How do we monitor performance?

Monitoring is key in digital marketing. It is closely linked with the objectives your organization has set out to achieve. It enables us know what is working and what is not. There is no point embarking on a digital journey without having in place the means to monitor progress. Most digital tools come with some form of analytics that enables the organizations get insights from ongoing digital processes.

Even more important than getting data is accurate analysis and interpretation.

Third party applications do exist to allow for a robust gleaning of insights, which in turn will determine if the digital marketing plan has to be reviewed or not.

Whatever the type of organization you work for, using this five-step approach to adopting digital technology will guarantee that your organization will record less failure rates and see a return on investments.

The End