Future-Proofing Your Marketing Efforts Through Digital Transformation
Discover how companies can future-proof their marketing efforts by transforming their organic marketing and martech stack.
While companies focus on digital transformation, digital marketing transformation is still in its nascent stages. Organic marketing is one of the pillars of digital marketing. Patrick Reinhart is the VP of Services and Thought Leadership at Conductor, discusses how companies can transform their marketing by transforming SEO and their martech stack.
Digital transformation — companies transforming how they use digital technologies to enhance areas of their business — is not a new concept. We have seen this buzzword used at countless conferences, on webinars, and in blogs. However, digital marketing transformation — how companies use martech to transform what they do today to create more efficiencies, more effectiveness, cost savings, and speed to market — is still getting its feet wet.
One of the biggest pillars of digital marketing transformation is organic marketing, which includes search engine optimization (SEO). Your website is your most important digital asset, and SEO is all about understanding your customers’ intent to create an optimized web experience for your customers. By optimizing your content and website to best serve your customers and prospects, you’ll be rewarded by Google’s search algorithm with a higher ranking and, in turn, will acquire more customers organically.
Why do you want to drive customers to your site organically? These customers are the best that money cannot buy: they are the lowest cost to acquire, have the highest conversion rate, are the most loyal, and have the greatest lifetime value. Organic marketing is all about maximizing your reach and building a mutually beneficial relationship with these high-win rates and high-lifetime value customers.
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Optimizing Organic and Paid Technologies for Digital Marketing Transformation
Investing in technology to transform your digital marketing efforts starts with evaluating your marketing mix to support your infrastructure to include both paid and organic solutions. By having a diverse mix of both organic and paid marketing channels, you can mitigate risk for a higher likelihood of future success. Your company also has a better chance of weathering whichever obstacles — internal factors, like budget cuts, or external factors, like market trends — that come its way.
Establishing the right tools and infrastructure to support these channels is just as important. Leveraging an enterprise SEO platform can help you manage your site and how you appear to those you’re trying to reach. Beyond this, not only do SEO platforms connect stakeholder teams that do not sit together (we will touch on more of this later), but they give you a system of record of all changes made, make reporting to leadership a cinch, and help your company move faster to get more done in less time.
By intentionally building a strong infrastructure to support these channels, it will not matter if your dedicated SEO managers leave, if your agencies come and go, or if you are forced to cut back the budget. You will have the bones in place to drive success, no matter what. From there, as you grow in organic maturity, having those teams and resources will serve you in years to come. By focusing on SEO as a strategy and not just a channel, everything will flow more easily: processes will happen more quickly, and you will make a stronger impact on your customers. On the other hand, if an SEO infrastructure is built later in the game, everything from website changes to content optimization will take more time and will be a much more arduous process.
Great Idea, But It’s Not That Simple
However, digital marketing transformation, like most things, has its challenges. The first thing you need is executive buy-in. The heads of digital marketing need to think about the power of organic, the technologies required, and how having the right tools and channels can help them see steady growth.
We are missing out on expressing the importance of this space to executives. By showing them how to harness the power of SEO and organic content and how to set up the right infrastructure and tools to support it, your business can future-proof itself for obstacles that arise. However, without this commitment, everything you do will be reactive, as opposed to proactive, and will cost your business money and time. While you can initially rely on external agencies to facilitate SEO success, if you do not have dedicated resources internally, the ultimate goal should be to bring SEO in-house. This is so that you can control overall strategy, timelines, and outcomes, all at a lower cost.
First step: you need to find an internal champion — ideally, one of these influential leaders like a CMO, Head of Digital, or Head of Demand Generation — to advocate for resources to be allocated to digital marketing transformation. When building your story, have the courage to show execs the power of this transition. As an SEO, I would build the story to leadership as trying to get the best customer possible, which is what you get through organic marketing. Not only is organic already the #1 or #2 traffic-driving channel to your website, but organic marketing delivers your lowest customer acquisition cost, highest conversion rate, and most loyal customers. Make a case by explaining the value of the organic channel and digital marketing transformation’s benefits, showing the ROI against making key changes happen. What is the ROI for bringing on two Content people, one SEO, and a new SEO technology? What is that going to do to our visibility, our traffic, our revenue, and our conversions? Build the business case to go to management to say, “here is why we should be doing this.”
If you are getting pushback or experiencing hesitations from leadership, opt for a pilot program. Often, you need to demonstrate success before there is ultimate buy-in, and most CMOs set aside a small budget each year for experimental solutions. Use this opportunity to prove the program’s value: focus on a specific strategic initiative that you know needs strong SEO and content-driven support (bonus: It will be easier to measure success when you focus on something hyper-specific).
Another option is to bring on an external digital marketing transformation consultant or agency for a year or two and then migrate them in-house when you can point to results. Still running into roadblocks? Internal leadership turnover is also a great opportunity to fight silos and can help your organization embrace change differently. Introducing these strategies to someone with a fresh perspective, especially during an onboarding meeting, maybe a simpler way to get buy-in and execute.
Another big challenge when transforming your digital marketing program within the context of SEO and content is that typically none of the key internal stakeholders (Web, Content, and SEO teams) report to the same person. SEO and content marketing success is a team sport. By leveraging the right collaborative technology, the “team captains” of each department can work together to go to market more quickly.
My advice: embrace enterprise SEO technology so your teams can collaborate in an SEO platform, and then utilize tools like Asana, Jira, and Trello to allow SEO, Content, and Web teams to join forces in a way they have never before. Once you have the tools in place, show the value for each stakeholder and how this collaboration will improve the quality of their work, help them execute more efficiently, and help them reach their specific team objectives. Another great way to help teams work together well is to establish a committee of enthusiastic members from each team to determine the best way to work together, potential challenges, and shared targeted outcomes.
See More: How Technology Leaders Use API and Microservices to Drive Digital Transformation
The Future Is Near: How a Recession Can Affect Digital Marketing Transformation
Budget cuts are inevitable, influenced by both internal and market pressures. In preparation for a potential recession this year, budgets may be cut back, similar to the beginning of the pandemic, which was another time we faced uncertainty. With fewer resources, how do you drive continued growth in traffic, visibility, and revenue? If you already have a structure in place, you are ahead of the game; you have built a shelter to weather the storms. If you do not, it is never too late to start, but I will be honest — it will be a lot more challenging, so it is vital to set yourself up for success and not waste any more time.
Ahead of potential budget rollbacks, take stock of your technologies: out of everything you are doing, what are you really using? What could you use less of? Reassess your entire martech stack, see what your plans are for the next 12-24 months, and determine which tools you will need to support these goals. From there, you can “cut the fat” to continue to support digital marketing transformation and SEO solutions. Technology should always help reduce headcount, create efficiencies, and do things faster. If you are paying for a technology that does none of these things, you should consider getting rid of it.
How to Measure Digital Transformation Success
So, now that you have the tools, the buy-in, and the budget, how do you measure digital marketing transformation success? Set clear goals and expectations with stakeholders ahead of time: If you are going to transform your team digitally, what is currently missing? Where would you like to be in 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months? Track that expectation and materialize the measurement. To show the true success of your efforts and to maintain the resources you need, everything must be goal driven. That could mean money-saving, time-saving, an improvement in customer service, faster time-to-market for getting content visible, and higher conversion rates. Whatever the goal, ensure you track it and communicate milestones to stakeholders and decision-makers.
The Bottom Line: It Is All About Commitment
Digital marketing transformation and organic / SEO tools can help you do great things. But ultimately, you need to build and sell the business value and show the ROI and benefits to key stakeholders. Your organization needs to dedicate itself to this work and make a cultural pledge to work together towards a common goal. You will, of course, experience setbacks. But by giving yourself the right foundation and then collaborating, fighting through obstacles, and persevering, your organization can weather anything that comes its way.
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