Whether your goal is to acquire more leads, convert prospects, or create more value from your customer base, digital marketing success is nearly difficult to achieve without the appropriate data, technology, and people.
Data, technology, and people are the three main digital marketing pillars available to digital marketers.
Each has a role in and of itself, but they are frequently isolated and inefficient. When you combine them, though, you have the basis for a highly powerful digital marketing approach.
The three pillars of digital marketing are data, technology, and people.
When we ask digital marketers what their biggest difficulty is, it’s nearly always maximising the value of their existing client base.
And for many, this is more important than gaining new consumers.
It’s no surprise, given that it costs five times as much to acquire a new client as it does to keep a current one. And, when you consider the massive amounts of data that businesses now have at their disposal but aren’t using, the opportunity to get even more insight into their consumers is enormous.
By far your most valuable asset is data. However, without the necessary technology, structure, and processes in place, that asset may quickly become obsolete.
Data comes in a variety of forms and sizes.
Organizations have access to a plethora of data that might originate through a range of various channels and activities:
Demographic information who the users are and what they are interested in
Customer action to date based on behavioural data
Contextual data, what’s going on in real-time.
Technology is a tremendous facilitator.
Technology will not fix anything on its own. However, when combined with the correct data and the necessary talent to understand it, it may provide enormous results. In your digital marketing stack, three major categories of technologies play critical roles:
External tools made by other companies that are frequently ‘off-the-shelf’
Web analytics, the measurement of online client activity and behaviour, including customised reports
Internal, self-developed solutions that match your specific demands and cannot be purchased ‘off-the-shelf.’
People are the human component of the problem.
People come in many forms and sizes, as we all know, and digital marketing is no exception. To get the most out of yours, you’ll need to keep track of:
Team structures and skillsets, how your team is made up and who performs what?
External vendors and agencies, the abilities that your team will need to outsource
Management should be mindful of how data is delivered to management teams and how it is viewed.
Integrating Digital Marketing Pillars for Long-Term Success
When the forces of data, technology, and people come together, they produce a self-filling circle of knowledge and insight. Each one provides information to the other.
Most instruments and technologies are rendered ineffective in the absence of data. And, just as a purchasing database is useless without data, an Email Service Provider (ESP) is fully reliant on data to function properly.
If the correct technology isn’t able to feed this data back to marketing and other teams, it’s extremely difficult to extract the right information, which is crucial for optimisation and marketing activity creation.
If you want to truly maximise opportunities to grow your customer base, you must also do the opposite. There are several technologies that generate data rather than consume it. Web analytics software, for example, continuously generates consumer activity information, which are subsequently given to marketers. And, in the end, how this data is used is up to the individuals in the organisation.
However, technology may have a huge influence on the people in an organisation. A tool requires the necessary aptitudes, abilities, and individuals to succeed. It may even render certain positions obsolete.
Most organisations, we’ve discovered, focus on one or two of these components. Some marketers have strong feelings about which is the most essential. However, without these three feeding each other, genuinely effective insight is very difficult to achieve.