Develop A Digital Marketing Blueprint

Digital has become the darling of the media and advertising worlds. Marketing budgets continue to shift toward interactive channels, and business innovation is increasingly founded on digital technologies. All of this is old news.

So why are so many companies failing to leverage digital effectively? The problem for many is that they haven’t designed a digital blueprint integrating their business priorities, the capabilities of their IT infrastructure, the online strategies of their competitors, and their ability to finance it in a way that will move them forward.

Three steps to sketching a digital blueprint
A digital blueprint is a focused, strategic plan aligning the organization with a digital vision and clearly articulates how to create value for customers, channel partners, key internal constituencies, and the company’s businesses and brands. The plan should guide investment decisions and lay out how digital enables the company to implement innovative business ideas and immersive customer experiences.

The digital blueprint typically has three parts:

1. Current and future assessment: This assessment has external and internal components. The external or marketplace analysis gathers holistic insights on how customers behave, examining how those behaviors impact their attitudes and decisions. The internal review sets priorities and looks at how an organization is set up—employee skills, operational capabilities and infrastructure—to implement digital strategy.

2. Strategic recommendations and phased road map: Based on insights from the assessment phase, recommendations are developed under key themes, such as “broadening the partner ecosystem” and “driving commerce activities.” For each theme, specific recommendations are developed for products and services, platform features and tools, brand experiences distributed across the Web, partnerships and media. These initiatives can then be prioritized based on business economics, customer needs, the needs of internal constituencies and operational readiness.

3. Experimental agenda for digital alternatives: Even as the core initiatives are built out, companies should set aside a budget specifically for looking at emerging technologies. This is where brands can experiment and learn from trends such as viral ideas in social media or prototypes for new interaction designs, all without creating distractions from the core digital business. The key is having the discipline to set aside funds, develop a learning agenda to focus on business or marketing questions and set up a robust test plan with the right metrics and measurements on the back end.

A digital blueprint provides companies with the vision to develop better customer experiences and effectively implement fully built-out digital solutions. It lives at the intersection between the company’s business strategy, marketing strategy and technology road map. The digital blueprint integrates elements such as major campaign themes and brand guidelines with planned upgrades to back-end systems. Plus, it prepares other stakeholders with information they need to evolve their plans. The key is to uncover, discuss and resolve all issues that can affect the digital strategy, and ensure alignment within the organization—even if the outcome is certain digital initiatives aren’t feasible in the short-term.

Implementing the digital blueprint
Going from strategy to implementation is a major challenge and requires a collaborative, fast-moving engagement model. First, the development process needs broad representation from key internal constituencies and buy-in from senior executives. Second, teams working on the digital strategy need a mix of participants who can develop pragmatic strategies and tactics. Third, there needs to be a balance between rigor and speed. If too much time is spent in the planning phase, organizations lose momentum and it becomes harder to drive to implementation.

In order to maintain this momentum, teams should be in place at the start of the engagement and continue in their roles after the initial phase is complete to guide the work on an ongoing basis. There are usually three required teams:

1. Core digital strategy development group: This team does the work, sets the agenda and aligns the rest of the organization around the initiative. It includes generalists, digital experts, the head of digital strategy and other key staff.

2. Cross-disciplinary group: This group incorporates people from across business units and disciplines and provides input into the development process, including business requirements and goals. Participants bring external and internal perspectives and help drive implementation in future phases of work. This group is often used as a review committee for interim presentations and acts as a sounding board for recommendations.

3. Executive steering committee: This group of senior executives makes the key decisions, helps drive outcomes across the organization, and removes barriers for the core team. Ideally, it includes the CEO, CMO, CTO and heads of the business groups.

Developing a digital blueprint requires energy and commitment, but the payoff can be dramatic. By elevating digital within the organization, a robust blueprint can help companies better engage consumers, drive business results and differentiate themselves from the competition.

Dave Friedman is president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish.