Strategy
The first step to alignment is to create a vision for the role interactive will play between your brand and consumers over time, as well as how your organization will support it.
This is different from the annual marketing plan in that traditional media and marketing investments were historically created in a relatively static environment. By and large, TV or print advertising media mixes have been allocated as a percentage of sales and haven't varied much from year to year. So, even after 10 years of interactive marketing, many companies are still left with this offline planning legacy on both the agency and client side.
The digital vision should ask and answer the following questions:
- Are you leveraging offline and online strategies by optimizing the strengths of each channel?
- If this is a multi-brand corporation, are your brands working together, alone or against each other online?
- What is your quantitative and qualitative model to allocate budget for online? And, does this model account for evolving time spent in each channel?
- How will your strategy reflect the effect of changing media landscape such as the rise of social networks, distributed media (i.e., widgets), the decline of network TV consumption and fewer minutes spent on portals?
- Do you have measurable success metrics?
- How do you create a sustainable competitive advantage?
The outcome of the research and strategic effort should identify the existing gaps and potential opportunities for your company, as well as serve as a guide to socialize the vision internally.
As an organization, you can't afford to be underinvested in the most critical aspects of interactive to your brand. That said, reality dictates that budgets, changing market conditions and organizational constraints will impact the ability to execute against the vision you've developed.