That is one of the big questions that we marketing professionals face almost every day.
As a way of opening up the debate, I published a survey on Linkedin to gather the opinions of other experts. The question was very simple: In your opinion, what is the biggest obstacle to taking advantage of digital marketing in a company/project? As answers, I chose four of the options that I considered closest.
As you can see in the uk telegram number results, after just over 400 votes , the winning option was the lack of strategy .Survey results: What is the biggest obstacle to taking advantage of marketing in a company? Tristán Elósegui
You can access the Linkedin post from here
I totally agree with the result.
Lack of strategy is one of the most common factors that prevent a company from taking advantage of marketing. Strategy as a starting point for marketing success is one of the things I have been betting on for a long, long time.
But is the answer that easy?
What comes first, the chicken or the egg? The strategy or the factors that make it work?
It's clear that strategy is the key, but what should we do to make it successful once it's defined? To get an answer, we can analyze the survey's options, plus some suggested by voters, as factors of marketing success:
Obsession with short-term and unrealistic results.
There were a few more suggestions, but these are the main ones. I agree with all of them, but I think they can all be derived from the initial options.
Based on the survey results, and my own opinion/experience, we can start from the premise that we need a strategy for marketing to be successful in a company or for it to be able to take advantage of it . But, if we analyze each of the remaining options, they all seem to make sense.
Training is a key factor, it is the key to changing both the culture and the people.
Experience is the quickest way for a company to become aware of what marketing, and especially digital marketing, really is, to take a real measure of the results it can obtain, to provide the necessary resources, etc., but if this activity has not been well focused (lack of strategy, training, etc.), it can result in greater opposition to everything that involves marketing or digital.
It is very common to find companies that have had bad experiences, bad advisors or a combination of both!
The last factor, management commitment , seems to be the key to the rest. But even this is influenced by the need for training or experience. Both can get management to commit to digital marketing, and this can result in them starting to take marketing seriously, and defining a strategy to guide them along the way.
So if there is no factor to start with, what should we do to get things working?
As you can probably imagine, there is no single answer. Marketing success in a company is the result of the combination of all these factors. But I want to take a stand and bet on one: management's commitment to a digital culture .
The key for companies to take advantage of marketing is in the commitment of the company's management or direction.
Why do I think management commitment is the key factor? For two main reasons:
Company culture : As with all major projects, the touchstone (what we must attack/change first) lies in the company's culture and people. And who best represents this in a company? In SMEs it is the founder, and in larger companies, management (understood in its broadest sense).
Implementation of large projects : for a project that affects so many areas of the company to be carried out, we need the project to start with management and, from there, go down to the rest of the areas. If we go from the bottom up, we will find countless obstacles that will cause the project to stop. In other words, we need leadership from management so that the rest of the company can get going.
If these two circumstances occur, it is understood that a plan will be defined (or external help will be requested to define it), which includes training and everything necessary to carry it out.
But how do we get management to commit in the first place? This is the key of keys.
It is a medium-term process : getting management to commit is not a matter of saying yes at a meeting or thanks to a dazzling proposal. We need management to be truly convinced of what they are going to do, its consequences and, above all, of the real need to do it.
Find the decision-makers and show them that they really need a marketing strategy. In addition to the benefit to the company, they need to see the advantages of having one for their department and/or area of influence.
“Elephants cut into bite-sized pieces”: we must be able to phase the project in such a way that the company is able to digest it. Sometimes, when we see something clear, we tend to add more and more issues to the project and it becomes something unmanageable for the company.
Training: if necessary, an internal training program can be proposed, which in addition to improving knowledge, helps to understand the need for the marketing strategy.