The Marketing Strategist:

Using Digital Media to Increase Lead Flow and Sales

August 7, 2014

Anna WhitingDavid Edelman, principal of marketing and sales, McKinsey & Co, knows from experience that digital marketing requires fundamental shifts in company culture and operations. As content continues to shift online, marketers must adopt a more disciplined approach to content creation, dissemination, and measurement. Marketing must become a social engine, driving content creation and dialogue. We asked Edelman what steps he could suggest for organizations that need to develop that kind of marketing discipline. He told us that there are three things marketing organizations need: 1) “The customer decision journey gives you a more holistic view of what’s happening as things become more digital. Where are people really looking for content? Who do they want to engage with? How do we help make sure that happens? You get a different perspective on all the deliverables that you manage in your relationships and in your planning process by explicitly asking: What are we doing for each of those stages? Which are the key battle grounds? Where are we spending our money? What is marketing doing versus sales? What content do we need at each stage of the decision journey? This is a way to organize and think about flow instead of seeing the relationship as a forced march down a funnel.” 2) “A content supply chain is a must. Digital and social media have a tendency to drive up content development expenses. You’re going to be putting out content, and it’s going to grow and grow over time. If you’re not careful about thinking about a supply chain with core assets that are packaged and put into different channels, you’re going to be creating way more content than you ever dreamed of.” “I’ve had a couple of clients, one in the software business and another in pharmaceuticals, who had never looked at their content supply chain costs because it wasn’t tracked. It was buried all over the place. But when they actually tallied the numbers, their costs were skyrocketing.” 3) “Analytics and a supporting infrastructure are needed to measure and understand what’s working and what’s not; who is engaging and who is not. With this information, you can optimize and tweak things over time. You need to have people in these roles who are on top of this and saying, “Well, this whole thematic direction that we went into is getting absolutely zero engagement. Our search engine optimization and our search rankings are not really going up. We need a different tack here.” To learn more, read the full interview with David Edelman

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