As companies seek new ways to reach customers and win market share, Digital Marketing has emerged as a critical commercial function. When managed well, Digital Marketing technologies can be tremendously effective. When managed poorly, they can damage customer goodwill and create unnecessary expense.
Best Practices, LLC conducted this study to explore key trends, success factors, and lessons learned for structuring Digital Marketing groups. The study also distills winning strategies for Digital Marketing activity management, staffing, and budget allocation to help executives manage their service costs and better serve their business units and their products.
Key Findings
Centralized Management of Digital Marketing Activities Most Effective: Overall centralized management of DM activities were rated most effective. Complaints associated with a decentralized DM structure included redundancy, brand inconsistency, added cost, and – for healthcare – regulatory risk.
Majority of Organizations Use Hybrid Digital Marketing Structure: For $1 billion+ companies, a purely centralized or decentralized structure creates more costs than benefits. Many respondents use a hybrid DM structure. However, across industries companies are strategically centralizing key activities.
Top Organizations Benefit from Better Metrics Tracking: Most healthcare companies lag behind other industries in formally tracking digital marketing analytics. Those that track fewer metrics are more likely to find metrics unhelpful in general.
Digital Marketing Budgets, especially in Healthcare, to Grow: 72% of healthcare companies and 84% of elite performers plan to increase their DM budgets by more than 10% in the next two years. By contrast, only 23% of non-healthcare companies plan to do so.