Why a Digital Roadmap May Be The Key You’ve Been Looking For
Here at OneCore, we often hear customers complain they are lost when it comes to new technology, and although they recognize the importance of innovation, they struggle to trust or invest into unproven emerging online marketing technologies.
What's New to You?
When it comes down to it, technology is constantly innovating, but keeping up with the latest in every vertical wouldn't be worthwhile. The reason keeping up with the latest technology wouldn't give you the greatest benefit is because you could be using that time to keep up with what's new to your industry. Nonetheless, you should be putting effort into adapting new technologies, strategies and tendencies, just being sure to focus on ones that are relevant to your company. If you don't know what's happening in your line of business, why should you be looking into what's new in someone else's?
The GPS for Digital Strategy
To establish what it is that you need, it is important you have all the information to make the informed decisions for your business. Thus, a roadmap would be essential as it will help you organize all the necessary information. I like to regard a digital roadmap as a GPS for digital strategy. It aids one to define, manage, and launch digital touch points and navigate the business to reach its goals.
Facts, Facts, Facts
In order to construct your digital roadmap, you need to have a series of key insights about your market and your business so you are able to present the potential opportunity of the new technologies to your associates or the board. Also, this will enable you to incorporate the facts and conclusions drawn from them in a visually persuasive and understandable format. Your insights should consist of an analysis of your competitor's efforts, your current market shares vs that of your competitors and how incorporating new technology into your strategy will boost these key numbers. This will be a great form of persuasion to non-marketers such as CEO's, CFO's and CIO's about the advantages of additional investment in digital marketing.
Know Your Brand's Needs
Each company has a different focus on where they need to develop their digital strategy. For example, let's say you see that your competitor is succeeding in content personalization, motivating you to want to focus on this form of marketing. However, if your company fails to thoroughly understand their customers' wants and needs through data analysis then content personalization would not be your primary focus. In this case, a CRM would be the new needed marketing technology and putting a system in place to collect data would come before moving into your competitor's area of strength. This is because knowing your customer can vitally change the way you communicate with them on every channel, not just your online store.
To end off, the three major take away points are:
- Build a roadmap before making any decisions
- Know that your roadmap will change frequently
When you come across something new on the web, look at where it could fit in your roadmap.