Mar 07 2011
Big brands have unique challenges in getting their organizations up-to-speed in digital marketing. I spent almost 6 years working at Procter & Gamble and they were also one of my clients. I’ve also worked with a number of big brand marketing companies on their social media strategy, and training is always a key component.
The problem with how many brands are organized is that they see digital as the responsibility of a specific “digital marketing” person, or their advertising agency or maybe they have a central digital group that works on it.
The problem with this approach is that a brand manager who is responsible for managing this still needs to understand the landscape to be able to effectively allocate resources and dollars and to manage relationships with the agency or internal digital marketer.
In working with big brands, one of the key issues that I noticed is that many brand managers and brand marketers don’t have a strong enough working knowledge of digital marketing and internet marketing to be able to do their jobs effectively.
Sure, they know about Twitter and Facebook, but they fail to really understand social media marketing strategies and differences, and they don’t really know about some of the more technical aspects of digital marketing.
Even the biggest brands with some of the best marketers and ad agencies fall into this trap. They don’t really understand internet marketing or digital.
This is a problem because the best social media and internet marketing is integrated with traditional marketing and builds off of traditional marketing strategies. Social media isn’t a stand-alone strategy – it should build off of the rest of your marketing. Many studies have also shown that the best results from digital come from integrating internet marketing with traditional marketing.
The solution is for brand managers to take ownership over their social media and digital marketing education. Bring in experts to train your group. Create a training and learning program. Ask your partners and suppliers to provide you with some training and education.
To be effective, marketers need a deeper understanding about how digital works, even if they aren’t directly executing it.
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