After my last article on client engagement and James Bond, I promised my management team that my next post would be “serious”. Unfortunately, every time I’ve started to write about the digital marketing stack, I couldn’t help but think “Avengers: ASSEMBLE!”
Visualizing and optimizing your organization’s digital marketing solutions can seem fairly overwhelming. Audience behavior is fickle, the scale is ever expanding and the possible solution set is multiplying annually. While I have every intention of approaching this process like a grown-up, to tackle this, we might need a little superhero power.
How can you get your digital dream team together? You need to do a little work. Follow these steps to get your Avengers assembled:
Step 1: Map your ecosystem
The key thing to remember is your map is not about you or your systems but about your client and the interactions that influence their buying decisions. You want to try and visualize the steps in your engagement cycle and what is going to help prospects and clients confirm that you are their best choice of business partner. Think of this as the question of whether the Avengers are going to be fighting in space or in the middle of a city? Against one single type of bad guy or lots of different ones? You need to understand the landscape and your targets’ behavior if you are going to approach them successfully.
Next you need to understand what is going to influence your prospect: are your targets making decisions based on website content or do you usually meet face-to-face? Are they going to be more influenced by lengthy thought leadership articles or advertisements in the Financial Times? This will help you understand if you need a digital pitch tool or mobile-advertisement solutions. The Avengers (and the tools in your marketing tech arsenal) have powers for a purpose and when you build your team you have to base it on what you are going to need to tackle the problem at hand.
You know your targets and your landscape, now you have to be S.H.I.E.L.D. You know you need the smarts, strength, and fighting skills but you don’t know if you need Hulk, Thor, Ironman, Black Widow or all of the above. Time to research your heroes.
Step 2: Do your research
If you’ve gotten this far in this article, you are probably familiar with the digital marketing supergraphic. There are a lot of superheroes out there and it’s hard to know if the latest start-up for social listening and analytics will be a key part of your stack or if you would be wasting your time and budget on a slick technology that doesn’t fit your business model. Do your research and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
If you are facing a technology purchase decision, all the research you need is probably available on-line but talk to your CIO before you get too far down any path. Even if he or she doesn’t focus a lot on marketing technology, they probably know some smart trustworthy people who can help advise you. Read analyst materials, understand the trends and think about the maturity of the solutions.
Build your list of possible vendors and write down how you are going to evaluate them. Weigh the benefits and risks; if this is your CRM solution and you are huge company, a start-up might not be right, but if you think your prospects are ready to consume video content on Twitter you are probably in the clear to work with the latest tech. Think of this like a choice between Captain America and Ironman: both are really strong players but one is super reliable and the other is super innovative, so only your particular requirements would push you to pick one over the other.
Don’t turn down any offers for demos. I might sound completely self-serving when I say that (if you want a demo of our product, get in touch) but seriously, if you aren’t sure what a product does but someone has said to check it out, give the sales guy 30 minutes. You might be surprised what is out there and it can spark further exploration. Just because the superhero is new to your industry, doesn’t mean it can’t delivery amazing results.
Step 3: Assemble!
You’ve found what you think is the right solution, you’ve shown your key stakeholders and you’re ready to line up your arsenal. This means integration. Integration is important (and downright critical for some parts of your ecosystem) but don’t be paralyzed by it. Just like Nick Fury doesn’t hesitate to bring in a new superhero who might cause a little disruption initially, you shouldn’t be afraid to try something new while you plan for deeper integration. APIs make most integration possible and vendors will help you fit the pieces together.
Trials and proof of concepts are helpful but take them seriously. The comic would be really boring if the best superheroes were left sitting on the bench. Before you put a new technology in your stack, make sure you’ve set up criteria to evaluate its effectiveness and resources to get it working to solve your problems.
Do not ever, under any circumstances, buy technology for technology sake. If you haven’t drawn it on your ecosystem map (and you’ve made sure it wasn’t an oversight) don’t buy it. Ask the vendor to show you where it fits on your map and if they can’t do this easily, ask them to come back in six to nine months. Things change fast and if you like the product it’s possible it will be a fit at some point.
Takeaways:
The challenges of optimizing the digital marketing stack are complex but you can break them down into workable steps. You need to understand your ecosystem based on the behavior of your target market. You need to research the possible tools available to help you and you need to fire them up and see what happens. No single technology solution can help you do any of this, no matter how big your CRM or how beautiful your website. You need a variety of superheroes with different strengths to work together on one team.
HighQ offers solutions and works with B2B marketing teams to adopt nimble solutions to fill gaps in their technology stack. Like the folks at Stark Industries, we are always tweaking our technology to deliver superhero suits that help our clients reach, connect, and engage with their clients more effectively and efficiently.
I ran a webinar showing you how to do the first step in the process: mapping the digital ecosystem. You can watch it online now to learn how to navigate the complex world of marketing technology.
Cover image: CC JD Hancock
