Digital marketing is a dynamic landscape, and achieving your goals requires more than just great content and clever campaigns. It’s about building strong relationships – both inside and outside your organisation. Think of it like a well-oiled machine: each stakeholder plays a vital role, and smooth communication keeps everything running efficiently.
Who are the Players?
Depending on your product or service, the structure of your company departments and what aspects of marketing and asset development are carried out in-house or outsourced your stakeholders will be different. Let’s meet some of the key stakeholders in the digital marketing game.
Internal Stakeholders:
These are the teammates within your company who contribute to your success. They might include:
- Sales Team: Understanding their needs and goals helps tailor campaigns to generate leads and boost conversions.
- Product Development Team: Collaboration ensures marketing messages align with new product features or updates.
- Customer Service Team: Their insights into customer pain points can inform content strategy and messaging.
- Design Team: The creative backbone of digital marketing! They translate marketing strategy into on-brand, visually appealing and user-centric experiences across websites, apps, social media graphics, and email marketing materials. You may also need to align your digital marketing efforts with print, radio or TV campaigns with them.
- Digital Team: These are the tech wizards who ensure your digital marketing campaigns run smoothly. They might handle tasks like website development, SEO implementation, and managing marketing automation tools.
- Data Analysis and Performance Team: The data detectives! They analyse campaign performance metrics, user behaviour, and website traffic to identify areas for improvement and optimise marketing strategies for maximum impact.
Building the Dream Team:
So how do you go about cultivating strong relationships?
- Early and Ongoing Collaboration: Include these stakeholder teams in the planning phases of your digital marketing initiatives. Their expertise in the early stages can significantly improve campaign effectiveness, mitigate risk, identify potential issues and contribute to solutions. The last thing you need is a costly pivot in the late stages of your campaign because you failed to communicate with your stakeholders in a timely and effective manner.
- Regular Open Communication: Keep everyone informed about marketing initiatives and their impact on their roles. Schedule regular meetings to share updates, celebrate and give praise, address challenges, and brainstorm new ideas. Clear communication channels foster collaboration.
- Shared Goals: Align your digital marketing objectives with the company’s overall goals. This creates a sense of shared purpose and motivates everyone to contribute.
- Mutual Respect: Value the expertise and insights each teammate brings to the table.
- Utilise MarTech: Take advantage of Marketing Technology, software tools and technologies that your business can leverage to automate, streamline, and optimize your marketing efforts. These are a vital way to help align goals, support communication, monitor progress and promote correct process when used correctly.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Leverage data insights to inform your design and digital implementation strategies and keep your stakeholders dialled into your progress and results.
By integrating these refinements and fostering strong relationships with these internal stakeholders, you create a well-oiled digital marketing machine. Each team contributes their unique expertise, leading to a more cohesive and successful strategy. Every iteration can strengthen good stakeholder relationships or weaken poor ones, so make sure you have a strategy in place and that you refine it over time to adapt to changes.
For example, when I was launching a new campaign to promote a new financial service at SunLife, one of the most challenging parts of the job would be managing the number of diverse stakeholders who needed to give input and feedback, and have oversight or sign-off throughout the launch. Leave any stakeholder out at a key stage, at your peril. Understanding my individual stakeholder’s needs and priorities helped me understand how to win buy-in, build trust and leverage their individual areas of expertise to meet project and campaign objectives in a positive and empowering way.
Other internal stakeholders
There can be countless different stakeholders for different aspects of your role. I can’t include them all and each job and company is unique. Don’t overlook the following stakeholder types.
- Senior Leadership Team: They hold a vested interest in the overall success of the company, and your digital marketing efforts contribute to achieving those goals. They might provide resources, approve budgets, and set strategic direction that impacts your work.
- Direct Manager: Depending on the size, distribution and structure of your company your direct manager may or may not be part of the senior leadership team. They directly oversee your performance and are responsible for your development. They provide guidance, support, and feedback on your marketing initiatives.
- Regulatory Compliance Team: All sales and marketing in the UK are subject to regulatory laws on Consumer Protection and Advertising Standards. Personal data, marketing permissions, inclusion and anti-discrimination laws or policies can all impact what we do. In the Financial sector, where I have worked, extremely strict rules must be adhered to, that can affect every word, call to action or statement you create and their relative position on any marketing or communication about financial products and services. Many companies have compliance teams who have a stake in what you produce and will have oversight. Digital marketing professionals are often responsible for 1st line compliance checks and procedures with compliance stakeholders.
While they’re definitely stakeholders and their input is crucial, they might not be directly involved in the tactical aspects of campaign development and implementation.
Customers as stakeholders.
They’re the ultimate goal! Today’s customers are more than just consumers; they’re brand advocates, influencers, and valuable sources of feedback. I make sure my digital marketing strategy focuses on fostering relationships with our customers, treating them as key stakeholders in our brand’s success.
Without understanding and managing the stake your customers have in your offering you will never make the most effective marketing strategy. Every campaign should begin with a deep understanding of your customer.
Check out my article on Cultivating Customers as Stakeholders for information on this topic.
Outsourcing
Your company may outsource various aspects of your business integral to your marketing strategy. It’s not uncommon for companies to outsource design work, website development or SEO management to specialist companies. These functions are still integral to the success of your campaign and these teams are still stakeholder relationships you need to manage. All the recommendations from above still apply, but external partners can pose some different and significant challenges.
Advantages:
- Expertise and Specialized Skills: External specialists bring a deep wealth of knowledge and experience in their specific fields. They can tackle tasks that might be outside your team’s skillset or bandwidth, improving the overall quality and effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.
- Fresh Perspectives: An outside viewpoint can challenge your existing strategies and spark new ideas. Their expertise can help you identify areas for improvement and optimize your campaigns for greater impact.
- Scalability: When needed, specialists can provide an extra set of hands to handle temporary surges in workload or specific campaign requirements. This allows you to manage your internal resources efficiently.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Hiring a specialist for a specific project or a short-term need can be more cost-effective than hiring a full-time employee with that skill set.
Challenges:
- Communication and Alignment: Ensuring clear communication and alignment with your goals can be a hurdle. Articulating your needs effectively and managing expectations is crucial. External partners will not be as familiar with your ways of working, your brand and voice or have the internal insight in your company to be proactive.
- Project Management: Managing multiple external relationships adds another layer of complexity. Effective project management skills are essential to ensure deadlines are met and projects stay on track. You will likely require additional time, resources and expertise to write briefs, specifications or requirements and success criteria which may demand a certain level of expertise internal to your company to do effectively.
- Integration and Collaboration: Integrating their work seamlessly with the overall marketing strategy requires good communication and collaboration. File management, copyright, due diligence, documentation, contracts and security considerations will need to be evaluated and managed.
- Loss of Control: Delegating tasks can feel like giving up some control. It’s important to establish clear performance metrics and communication protocols.
- Knowledge Isolation and Loss: When you outsource, knowledge about that aspect of your business becomes isolated within the specific company and their potentially high-turnover employees. It is easily lost, hard to document but costly and inefficient to repeatedly onboard. You may be assigned different staff without notice or handover. You may switch providers or want to bring it in-house, either way, you often have to start from scratch again.
- Limited Scope: External agencies are typically contracted for specific tasks, like designing a website or developing a single campaign. They might not be incentivized to consider the bigger picture or suggest proactive improvements beyond the immediate project, not considering long-term strategies for sustainable development and growth. For example, without careful management, what agencies deliver may not integrate with previous projects, may use different technology, create siloed data or unnecessary new processes with the added overhead of adopting and maintaining these alongside the old.
- Reactive, Not Proactive: Agencies focus is often on completing the assigned task. Proactive suggestions for cost savings, ongoing optimization, maintenance, or strategic adjustments usually fall outside the scope of the contract.
- Knowledge Gap: The external team might not fully understand your brand, target audience, or overall marketing strategy. This may lead to slightly off-message results and poor brand consistency. Opportunities to connect the outsourced project with other marketing efforts can be missed.
- Geographic Gap: If you outsource work to other countries you may face language, culture, work ethic, education, communication, ethical, public relations and time-zone issues. Do your research and ensure you understand the cost, time and infrastructure needs these issues can cause before you take this path. Making redundancies and outsourcing to companies in potentially cheaper locations may be counter-productive, and unethical. It can cost you more for a poorer outcome, a damaged brand with customers and reduced employee engagement.
- Cost: Out-sourcing key aspects of your marketing operations can be less cost-effective than hiring full-time employees with those skill sets, devoted solely to your company’s interests. Agencies charge for project management and account management time on top of the actual specialists you employ. Extra rounds of changes, testing or specialist skills like accessibility will usually cost extra. Their prices, by necessity, will include a margin to cover their company overheads on top of salaries, while quoted prices and timescales include a healthy contingency to ensure they can meet deadlines and performance metrics and still make a healthy profit.
Solutions to Bridge the Gap:
I have worked on both sides of the outsourcing relationship so I know some great tips to help you manage projects with external providers:
- Clearly Defined Scope, with Room for Input: While outlining the project details, leave room for the external agency’s feedback and suggestions. Their expertise can identify potential issues or opportunities you might have missed.
- Retainer Agreements: Consider retainer agreements instead of one-off project contracts. This fosters a more ongoing relationship and incentivises the agency to think strategically about your company’s long-term goals.
- Internal Project Management: Maintain a strong internal project management team, using agile methodologies and tools, to bridge the knowledge gap. They can translate your overall marketing strategy for the external team, keep timelines on track, help ensure alignment and provide continuity between campaigns.
- Focus on Long-Term Partnerships: Develop long-term partnerships with trusted agencies. Building a strong relationship encourages them to invest their knowledge and go beyond just completing tasks.
- Internal Skill Development: Invest in hiring multi-skilled internal team members or upskilling your internal team on certain aspects like basic web development or SEO principles to equip them to handle smaller maintenance tasks and manage and communicate with external agencies more effectively.
Finding the Right Balance:
Outsourcing can be a powerful tool, but understanding its limitations is crucial. By implementing these solutions, I found I can leverage the expertise of external specialists while ensuring proactive strategy and ongoing maintenance remain priorities within my overall digital marketing efforts.
The Power of External Connections:
I have found that creating and managing relationships with external stakeholders has a valuable part to play in a long term marketing strategy. Once you have the basics of your regular campaigns covered, these are great areas to expand your digital marketing efforts for the long term and leverage external connections to broaden your reach, open new opportunities and increase your credibility.
- Media & Influencers: Partnering with relevant media outlets and industry influencers can expand your reach and credibility.
- Industry Partners: Collaboration with complementary businesses can open doors to new audiences and co-marketing opportunities.
- PR: In smaller companies, the marketing manager might also handle PR duties, in larger companies collaboration with the PR team is essential for stakeholder management to share goals, schedules and coordinate efforts, have a unified message and manage external PR related stakeholders.
