Strategic digital marketing has become equivalent to marketing leadership in order to obtain overall marketing goals.
At present, digital marketers have a much more prominent role to play in their organizations. The marked shift toward digital business in the previous year amid the pandemic has extended digital marketing remit to include improved strategic marketing objectives in place.
The degree to which marketing leadership aligns with general marketing leadership is an immediate outcome of the extensive role digital now plays over various marketing strategies and objectives. According to the “Digital Marketing Survey 2021, Part 1: Agile Planning and Clear Leadership Mitigate Disruption” of 350+ marketing specialists globally, approximately 36% of digital marketing leaders hold the title of chief marketing officer today.
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As the connection between marketing leadership and digital marketing evolves, marketing experts will need to stay aware of the possible obstacles and efforts. It will help them increase the impact of marketing in their organization.
Even digital marketing is liable for defining and meeting strategic marketing goals with the help of connected conversations which engage target market segments, spanning different digital channels.
Hence, the digital marketing professionals have required expertise across a range of functions – including core marketing channels to analytics, content creation and management, media planning, and buying, along with digital commerce.
Even though most participants do not indicate sole responsibility, they lead an outsized group responsible for such initiatives. It involves driving customer retention, designing processes, and workflows to optimize the evolving roles of relevant channels.
Contributing to the concern is the degree to which marketing leadership progressively aligns with the entire marketing leadership. This was reflected in the seniority of the surveyed respondents – with nearly 85% of the marketing leaders holding the title of VP or higher.
Gartner also revealed that IT plays a substantial role in elevating marketing technologies and data analytics while managing them to maximum effect. In fact, the CEO is the digital marketing leader’s strongest proponent in an organization. It even put the CEO at the center of the marketing leaders’ collaboration zone, right beside the IT team.
The broad set of business responsibilities by digital marketing leads similarly extends to channel-specific strategies along with execution. For most channel-related initiatives, many marketers (about 50%) revealed that they are responsible for:
- Content marketing strategy and its implementation (57%)
- Branding strategy, advertising, and execution (54%)
- Integrating mobile marketing into the digital mix (53%)
- SEO/SEM plan as well as execution (53%)
- Email marketing procedure and implementation (52%)
- Media strategy and overall performance (51%)
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Undoubtedly, digital marketing leaders, mainly those with an organization-wide span of control, need to balance broader business objectives and channel strategy and execution goals. Striving for an excellent balance demands channel-agnostic decisions – within the service of larger objectives.
With digital marketing continues on the way of augmented collaboration, marketing leaders spanning different industry verticals need to watch out for roadblocks with product development, sales, and supply chain operations. Otherwise, they can hinder the marketing efforts in the future – this is more acute for the B2B organizations.
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