Building Support For Your Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Building internal support

There are some critical things that you have to do in order to secure internal support for your programs, from either your fellow marketers or from other people within the company. You need to help people understand each of the following:

• How digital transformation will help them achieve their own goals
• How digital transformation will benefit the entire team
• How they can easily get started
• The type of support they will receive from your team (training, framework, materials, tools, relevant content, best practices, and so on)
• How their success will be measured globally

Effect of employee advocacy on digital transformation

Employee advocacy is the promotion of an organization by its staff members. An employee advocate is someone who:

• Generates positive exposure and raises awareness for a brand through digital media or offline channels
• Recommends a company’s products or services to a friend or family member
• Represents the best interests of the company both internally and externally
• Can help build employee ownership of the organization
• Is an expert on your product or service and can be a credible spokesperson for your company

Employee advocacy is critical to a global digital transformation, as it can provide customers with real and meaningful interactions with employees. Furthermore, a digital transformation is far more likely to be successful if employees are on board and have a personal interest in promoting the use and benefits of a digital transformation.

Embedding digital transformation into the fabric of your company

Let’s take a closer look at some of the elements of digital transformation, and how you can embed them into the fabric of your company:

• Educating and partnering with key stakeholders. This can be a vital way to get a wide range of stakeholders on board. First of all, identify those key stakeholders. How should you educate them? What should you be telling them? How can you partner with them? Why should they dedicate time and resources to your program?
• Widely communicating results throughout the company. This enables others to see the progress and then want to get on board. But how exactly will you communicate those results? You could use a company newsletter. You could just talk to people ahead of team meetings. However you do it, people need to feel that digital transformation is part of what they’re doing and not something that’s been imposed on them from above.
• Ensuring that digital strategy is considered a critical part of the strategic planning process from the beginning. This enables the organization to incorporate it across the entire planning process.
• Securing a variety of executive supporters across the organization by making it personally beneficial for them. Answering the ‘what’s in it for them?’ question is vitally important.
• Creating a company-wide employee advocacy program. This helps everyone get behind the idea. People – even long-serving employees who are 100% committed to the company – can be wary of fads, if they don’t really see the value of them. If you can win them over through evidence-based decision making, they could become your strongest supporters.