Jul
14
Where Does Digital Marketing Sit In An Organization?
When most companies begin discussing digital marketing one of the items that arises is where should this “new” digital marketing person or team sit within the organization. And then the debate begins. Should they sit on the web team? marketing team? a new separate digital team?
This is often a difficult discussion because depending on the role of the individual digital marketer, they could sit anywhere. The questions comes down to what is the goal of the role?.. and how will they be measured? As digital marketing is the hot new position and topic area for organizations, it’s really important to understand the purpose and how it will benefit your company.
I see a digital marketing person as a marketing individual(s) who understands and has the skills to build and drive digital campaigns. Be it search, paid ads, email, syndication, blogging, even trade shows, and so on. Both from the strategy and execution side of building marketing plans and campaigns. Though most of these “tasks” touch the web in some form, typically there is a web counterpart either a webmaster or other web person to help with edits to the website. However, with the great CMS’s available today, digital marketers can update web pages as needed by themselves without the worry of deleting or causing 404 outages.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that with digital marketing it does not necessarily mean you have to have digital marketing in your title. There are a lot of individuals who technically include digital in campaigns especially those roles that are focused on demand and lead generation. As your target audience is using digital day-to-day, the best way to increase awareness and drive leads is via digital channels.
It really comes down to what is your strategy, who are you targeting, and how are you going achieve the goals you set. Essentially, what makes your team the best marketing engine to drive business.
Earlier this year, Adobe had a great article on not focusing so much on where but modifying the approach to marketing with the expansion into digital campaigns and markets. It’s about impressing digital and making it easier to find and conduct business with you. It’s really not about creating a new team it’s more about having the right skills either on staff or with an agency to understand and execute the new realm and increase of digital marketing.
Teaming Overall, it’s about building the right team and working together to combine traditional successful marketing techniques while incorporating and creating new digital marketing techniques to drive growth for your business.
As such integrating digital marketing within the marketing organization while building and maintaining a strong relationship with the web team is the best first step in creating a digital marketing organization.
