According to Forrester’s Shar VanBoskirk, interactive marketing spend will reach $77 Billion in five years, equaling television spend. Even more daunting, interactive departments are growing at nearly 100% per year to keep pace. Growing the interactive organization requires a focus on decision rights, performance measures, and reward systems.
Running an organization that is doubling personnel every year requires a strategy and experienced leadership. My guidance for the best chance of success includes:
- Invest in an interactive strategy leader that is responsible for strategy and execution
- Make Interactive Strategic in the c-suite and form an advisory team
- Motivate the team by allowing them to modify the brand for the interactive audience and make the team own those interactions with the customer
- Allow Interactive to report at the top of the organization so decision-making is swift
- Allow the team to test and incorporate key learning across the portfolio
- Have a clue about how to build out an interactive group capable of authoring, editing, approving, and publishing digital media
- Minimum needs are integrated digital product development, product management, and product marketing
- Don’t go it alone, there are many goods solutions to cobble together solutions in email automation, social media monitoring and engagement, SEM and display platforms, ad networks, content management, e-commerce, and analytics
- Ensure the data flows into the CRM systems
- Own and staff for brand ownership, retain brand rights for texture, style, and tone, never let this out of your review and approval process, staff as many product/brand managers as necessary to keep ahead of the curve
Finding experienced leaders to help you grow with 10 or more years of experience of continuous practice is challenging but required. The investments you make in this break neck growth cycle with technology and partnerships will determine your ability to meet the interactive customers’ expectations over the next five years. As experienced teams know technology decisions are tightly coupled with interactive product feature capabilities and those features drive sales.
