Review how to integrate digital marketing into your marketing team's structure through Digital Transformation

The latest Smart Insights research study shows how common Digital Transformation projects or programme are today with 30% already having a programme up & running and 31% planning to within the next year. Yet, digital transformation doesn’t occur overnight. There are a series of steps to go through to get there and the critical factor is the staff. Imagine a world where your Digital Working Party, Digital Group, or Digital Collective is in place, they’ve had several meetings and agreed on an action plan! What’s next? Let's take look at options and examples of how you structure your digital team. Also, crucially, what does this mean in terms of your marketing funnel? We've got marketing tools and templates to support you in building a strong digital strategy, and structuring your marketing team to get the most…

How to define an appropriate budget for digital transformation - one that’s realistic yet takes into consideration the aspirations of and opportunities available to your organization

This a difficult balancing act, and never more so than for digital transformation projects. Here, we share some tips to deliver you a budget that effectively serves your transformation aims, helping you maximize the impact of your initiatives. With so many different moving parts, digital transformation projects require a rock-solid foundation from which to build - including a budget that accurately reflects the scale and complexity of the initiative, while remaining achievable and realistic. However defining such a budget - not to mention getting it signed off - can be challenging. We’ve all heard the horror stories of projects going over budget, stalling, or even being abandoned altogether. If you’re currently in the early stages of your digital transformation journey and want to avoid a similar fate, this…

Following our Digital Transformation webinar, we look back at some of the questions asked by the audience

It was great to see the interest in our recent digital transformation webinar: Benchmarking your Digital Future (now available on demand).There were so many questions, from strategic to practical, that we couldn’t get to them all on the call, so we promised to share them via our blog. Before we get into your questions, I want to share a questions I asked attendees, What are your plans for digital transformation? which is a similar to this question in our previous ‘Managing digital marketing research report’. Popularity of Digital Transformation projects This is very similar to what we found on the poll in the webinar where around a third of the attendees have plans to start a project within 12 months and a third of attendees have recently…

Though business has changed drastically in the Internet Age, these age-old SOPs can still save your sanity

Contrary to the popular belief of some employees, a management style that relies on standard operating procedures (SOP) does not have a primary goal of driving everyone bat guano crazy with detail-oriented documentation. Actually, the entire point of SOPs, done correctly, is to make an organization more efficient by saving time and effort when faced with recurring situations. As the digital transformation of business quickens and the globe shrinks, never has it been more important to put processes in place that support the scaling of companies into a position to take advantage of the profit potential in international markets. When the internet lurched into the mass consciousness back in the mid-1990s, it was impossible for most businesses to comprehend the ultimate effect it would have. Now, almost a few decades into the 21st century, we…

The ‘digital’ opportunity is enormous, with staggering growth in all territories and sectors

Along with the opportunities come some significant challenges as you adapt to highly demanding digitally-savvy customers. These challenges are caused by the pace, complexity and the degree of change.    This shifting environment means that digitally-led business transformation is a complex and on-going journey - an evolution to transition and optimise your business. Even digitally native companies know that they have to innovate and stay ahead of the game because of growing disruption and rapid technological change.

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Are Spotify and Valve models to be followed or impossible to replicate?

We live in an age of Digital Disruption. The biggest transport provider (Uber) owns no cars, the biggest accommodation provider (Airbnb) owns no rooms, the biggest content provider (Facebook) creates no content. These new businesses have brought with them radically different models of organisational structure which was part of the reason they were able to do better than anyone before in their respective industries. Many of what were once new and exciting little start-ups, involving young folks tinkering in their garages are now massive businesses with more conventional corporate structures. Google and Apple are now two of the Worlds largest companies, and have all of the usual trappings of corporate hierarchy, like Presidents, CEOs, and managers of all different types. But there are some companies which have retained their start-up culture and really do have radically different structures, which most marketers would…

A look at academic research on change management with a digital lens

"You can't do today's job with yesterday's methods and be in business tomorrow" - Peter F Drucker The current Mrs Sealey and I sat down recently to watch Captain America: the Winter Soldier (my choice). It's a great action packed film that sets things up nicely for the forthcoming Avengers 2 movie. It occurred to me during the film that Captain America is a leader of change. He identifies threats and handles them with help from the ensemble cast. He removes corruption, replacing it with new alliance with the vision and mission to do right. Let me segue into the main topic of this post; accelerating digital transformation (definition). I've had the good fortune in my career to work for or with digital leaders who are attempting to do something new and brave. One thing that is common about…

Digital Impact Conference 2014, Wednesday 17th September 2014, Central London

We're in the final countdown to our first conference in London and looking forward to meeting everyone who has booked. Thank you if you have registered! The final confirmed programme is below. We have just 8 tickets remaining, so it will be a "full house". If you haven't registered, but are now able to attend, then we would, of course, like to welcome you - please register via Eventbrite which has details on discounts for Smart Insights members that are still available. Here is the final, confirmed programme for the day. You can also download a PDF of the programme here Smart Insights Digital Impact Final Conference Programme.

Finding the venue

Of course, you know how to use Google Maps, but we have found that the venue needs careful navigation to…