Digital Marketing Simplified – On Your Mark, Get Set, Go

Digital Marketing Simplified – On Your Mark, Get Set, Go

By Rakesh Raman

Rakesh Raman

This is the last article in the 7-part Digital Marketing Simplified series that RMN Digital had started.

“On Your Mark, Get Set, Go” is an expression that prompts athletes to get ready for a race.

For a business person, digital marketing plan implementation is also a kind of race. You need to be careful, as a toe out of line can simply throw you out of the race.

After learning various aspects of digital marketing in the first six lessons of our Digital Marketing Simplified series, now it’s time for you to start implementing each of them to achieve your business goals.

Here are the steps that you can take to begin the digital marketing exercise in your company.

Build the Team

Digital marketing is not an ad hoc task for your organization. You need to do it in a totally professional manner. The first step for you will be to create a dedicated team to handle digital marketing.

You can identify the people in your organization or hire new people for this area of business operations. Depending on the size of your company, you can have one, two, or more members in this team.

The basic qualifications for these team members will be good command over the language, understanding of your business and the market in which you operate, and knowledge of online platforms.

Make the Process

If you want to carry out the digital marketing exercise seriously, you must make an end-to-end process for it. If your process is not in place, all your efforts will go futile.

The process will include information flow, its validation, value addition, delivery, external feedback collection, and response management.

After creating the process, its documentation is equally important. All your team members should know their individual roles and adhere to this process.

Peer Learning

You must have realized that there is hardly any systematic and reliable literature available to learn and keep yourself updated on different aspects of digital marketing. Still, your learning should not stop.

As the head or the marketing head of your organization, you must guide your digital marketing team to constantly acquire related skills. For this, your people can form peer groups with people from other companies to discuss, share ideas, and learn from each other’s experience.

Similarly, your team members can participate in digital marketing training programs that keep happening in all markets of the world.

External Support

While in-house team formation for digital marketing is important, you can also hire external services to supplement your efforts.

Depending on your needs, you can hire either a digital marketing agency or an individual professional who can work in coordination with your in-house team.

Agencies and professionals work on project basis or long-term retainer arrangements. Their rates differ from market to market and their skill levels.

Budgeting

It will be much easier for you to take decisions related to your digital marketing activities if you earmark a specific budget for them for each quarter and for every year.

Your actual expenditure may not be the same as you have budgeted. But it will help you empirically measure the variance and know the reasons for it allowing you to further refine your digital marketing activities.

This should suffice for the time being. You can now be on your mark and ready for the digital race.

By Rakesh Raman, the managing editor of RMN Digital.

This article is a part of our initiative: Tech-Wise Knowledge Center for SMBs