Challenges in digital marketing

In the latest article released by McKinsey Quarterly, one McK partner pointed out 3 biggest challenges in mastering digital marketing:

One of the first is—just starting with data and discovery—the dream that you’re going to have an integrated customer-data warehouse. That is a dream that, for many organizations, can take years to put together. And it’s going to be very hard. As you’re putting it together, things are going to keep moving. So it’s not something that you should be waiting for. It’s waiting for Godot.

Instead, you should be thinking about—for a limited range of things that we think are going to be the highest value, for a particular range of segments—what is the data we need just for that, and can we create a lightweight way of bringing that together?

The second challenge is organizational impediments to getting people to work together. So much of this now is about the customer’s journey. They’re on a cross-channel journey where they’re going to touch your mobile site, use their laptop, talk to somebody over the phone, go into a store. It’s all one journey. And you’ve got to be able to look at that in its totality and get people to work together and acknowledge the fact that these channels are all going to have different roles.

The last part is working through what it takes to test and learn. We’ve seen a lot of companies saying, “Well, we don’t have the budget to do that many variations of a web landing page.” Or “We don’t really see how we can get approvals that fast through compliance, and through our legal folks.” It starts with just an attitude and leadership, saying, “We are going to work this through and going to work together as a team to try to get these obstacles out of the way.”

In terms of solutions, it says that prioritizing the data; getting the right people from different functions to work together; and working on that rapid-cycle test and learn—are really what you’re trying to drive toward. If you can build those muscles, you can apply that to whatever stuff digital’s going to throw your way. And there’s always going to be new digital stuff.