Also read: Marketing in the new world - Part 1
As if dealing with the plethora of new age marketing paradigms wasn’t complex enough, marketers now have to grapple with another benchmark called DQ or Digital Quotient. DQ is nothing but a benchmark which determines how robust the company’s digital marketing strategy is and how it is implementing its information technology roadmap effectively. A company’s digital quotient (DQ) is a function of how well defined its long-term digital strategy is, its effectiveness in implementing that strategy, and the strength of its organizational infrastructure and IT. So if you aren’t thinking about DQ today, chances are your marketing is bereft of a very potent and catalytic process that could break or make you. In my journey in understanding how to quickly get on the road to building an effective digital quotient, here are a few thoughts that I have gathered along the way:
- Take that leap today: The Universal Customer Footprint is still some dreams away. If we wait for a streamlined framework to spring up, be able to consolidate all the data and actually be able to create very structured customer patterns, then it will take many years to put this together. Instead what I would recommend is taking small steps, what is the data required for that instance, can we access that from the digital initiatives we have ongoing currently? Does it throw up instances that we can collate?
- Monitor the journey: Eventually the customer’s journey has to integrate- i.e how do they access information, their buyer’s online preferences, their in-store experiences, all this will start overlapping over a period of time. The ability for the digital marketing arm of the enterprise to capture all the milestones in the journey means a very strong collaboration with the CIO and technology arm.
- Start small: It’s the best way to pick up gaps in strategy and execution, and also allows regional and central teams to sift through the maze of corporate policies, regional cultural nuances and preferences.
- Culture matters: I recently spoke to the global digital leader of a very well- known cosmetic brand who mentioned how they sell in Latam is radically different from Russia or India where the buying and paying preferences range from instalments to credit purchases for their very niche range of products. That also has a profound impact on the way you create your digital marketing and ecommerce strategies in country.
- Be Smart and Prioritize: Let’s get this one right. Tools and fancy systems can’t beat smart decisions, and a thought through process design that is aligned with the business imperatives.
- Get Leadership to adapt: See, digital won’t go away even if you wish for it. It’s not just another channel that you can tell the CMO to budget for. Its radical, its different, it has the potential to change the way we operate because it just means decisions are now more and more about data, more and more about dynamic customer preferences. And that means we don’t have too much time to sit back and allow the data to befuddle us.
- Enable Collaboration: It always was key to success- just that it has become mandatory now. How can channels interact, how can I create collaborative patterns for my product, regional, sales, delivery teams. Well, the problem just gets more complex because the data is getting complicated too. How can I enable information to flow faster, how do I create better cross functional collaboration. That is the key.
Let’s see how you build your DQ today!
