Digital Marketing Strategy’s Internal Impact

What’s your strategy behind the digital marketing strategy? Every marketer is messaging to multiple audiences at once: your buyers, of course…but also your executives, peers within your organization, peers outside your organization, and even competitors.

You develop a digital marketing strategy so that you can go from where you are to where you want to be, with the resources you have available. At face value, you understand that strategy to be directed at an external audience that gives you money. But in reality, your marketing strategy may do more inside your organization (marketed to the internal audience that also gives you money) to help you move forward than the external strategy ever could. Here’s what we mean:

Internal Problems to Solve

How many of these problems would you like to solve this year?

1. Get more executive buy-in on key marketing initiatives

   The greatest problem business leaders tend to have with marketing is that they don’t understand it—they don’t know why marketing is doing this, that or the other; how to connect marketing initiative A with business objectives 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.; what exactly they’re buying besides “clicks” with their marketing budget; and on and on.But when you have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy, everything rolls up to language that a CEO or CFO speaks. They may not care about “micro-conversion rates,” but they do care about customer lifetime value, customer retention, frontline sales calls, etc. When another executive tries to cut your budget, you can ask if they’d like to lose revenue now, or later…or both. That gets their attention pretty quickly.

2. Reduce—or even eliminate—bickering over marketing data and attribution
   Your digital marketing strategy is built on key goals to achieve, with mile markers along the way. If it isn’t, then you have less of a strategy and more of a task list. When you create your strategy, you create a vision. With that vision, you also create a template for how others interpret marketing’s accomplishments.

    

3. Reach more of your key goals

   Casting that vision in your digital marketing strategy helps other leads catch on. So when budget cuts are coming, you are able to remind them what you’re building toward…and what they give up if they choose to cut marketing’s budget.But as we all know, marketing budgets change, and that’s a pain. So when you have your strategy laid out and part of your budget is wiped away, you have a clear plan for re-prioritizing. That way your next performance review is inherently based on the budget that was allocated. You don’t miss your goals when the means to accomplish them is taken away.

4. Increase marketing’s value in your organization
   Said another way, you can increase your organization’s understanding of marketing. Everyone knows they need marketing…but it’s hard to value what you don’t understand. A digital marketing strategy lays it out for them.

Audience Jobs to Be Done

Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen said what we’ve all been thinking but no one had previously enunciated: That your customers buy your product or service to get from where they are to where they need to be, and you are their means to an end. In other words, they have a job to be done and they are hiring your product to do it.

Your most unifying metric among your buyers isn’t whether they’re 61% female, or 45% Millennial; it’s the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish. This is what the Christensen has come to call the “job to be done.”

That’s the key to your external digital marketing strategy—if you want to increase customer lifetime value, what’s going to bring your audience back to you in order to do the job? If you want to increase awareness, why does your audience want to know about you? What job could be done, but isn’t?

Applying Jobs to Be Done, and Strategy, Internally

People in your organization might be working in silos, but no one is working in a vacuum.

Each of these business units has a job to be done, and marketing can play a role in each. To help the individual departments or silos to value the work that marketing is doing in them, marketing has to treat them like their external audience: talk about their cares and concerns, and show them how they can grow when they trust you with their job to be done.

Your digital marketing strategy necessarily includes areas where marketing depends on other departments, and where other departments need marketing’s insights. Create the clarity and understanding in your organization that stems from a well-laid plan, and you’ll be the one everyone depends on.

Now that’s a solid strategy.

Need Help Building, Executing, or Measuring Your Strategy?

For starters, there’s an entire bundle of frameworks that we built for you to use to create a cohesive, well-structured strategy by the end of next week: We call it the Speedy Strategy Bundle.

Rogue’s Speedy Strategy Bundle has the templates and tools to help you do the heavy thinking before you do the heavy lifting required for explosive marketing growth.

Templates make the work simple, but that doesn’t mean the work isn’t hard. That’s where Rogue can help. If you’re ready to work with a group that thinks about marketing from the perspective of the rest of the business, then there’s a group of rogue marketers who can help. We’re just a click away.

If you’re ready to move further, faster, talk to Rogue today.