Operationalization Stage

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Stage 3 of organizational maturity is the ‘operationalization’ stage. This is where things are up and running, people are on board, you’re starting to put your strategy into practice at the company. Some people might think that your battle is over, but it’s often just beginning. This stage can be broken into nine areas:

• Focus your efforts. Do not get distracted by the next shiny object.
• Create a solid content pipeline. You need to have a solid content pipeline, so that you are ready to push things at your audience. In order to do that, you need to know: who is your audience, what kind of content are they consuming, and how can you plan ahead to keep producing content that’s relevant? A good approach is to ask, “What are the messages that you would like to get across to the people who are consuming your content? What do you want to be known for? What do you want to be famous for?” And then distribute content throughout your content pipeline that helps to reinforce those messages.
• Scale central infrastructure. Invest in the right tools.
• Refine your metrics, tracking, and insights. Look at quantitative and qualitative metrics. Are people reading the emails, are people going to the links that are in the emails, and can you track this? What other metrics should you use?
• Secure, manage, and grow your budget smartly. Are you putting your budget behind the things that people care about?
• Scale the program across the company. This includes business units, geographies, and functions.
• Shamelessly promote successes.
• Report regularly and visibly. People will want to know how you’re doing. Use all the data you have access to, and show people what’s going well - and what changes you are going to make to improve areas that aren’t performing so well.
• Recognize and celebrate employees. Create an advocacy program.