Below is my recent presentation to the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association annual conference. I’ve laid out 7 digital trends that are pertinent to the funeral industry and have given some helpful hints on some digital tools funeral directors can use to improve their digital footprint.
Struggle in Building A Digital Marketing Team
Hiring managers these days are struggling to find good digital marketing talent according to the Online Marketing Institute. They surveyed almost 750 Fortune 500 and ad agency execs and the results showed there’s a vast gap between the digital marketing expertise needed by organizations and the talent that is actually available to them at every level.
Many times the trouble starts with the hiring managers who don’t have enough work experience in hiring the optimal digital marketing team. About 30% of the time companies haven’t hired in the past year because they can’t figure out who to go to for talent.
Just Getting By
Many companies are doing just enough by working with the talent they already have to sustain their digital marketing campaigns. Many times the tech people don’t have the marketing skills and the marketers are lacking the tech skills so its difficult to get someone to pull it altogether.
Invest In Talent
If companies are just maintaining current staffing but they’re most certainly missing significant opportunities that better qualified digital talent, contractors or consultants could take advantage of. It may take some time and the willingness to pay for experience but if companies dedicate themselves to finding digital talent with the proper skills and experience they will have a much better shot at:
Here are some resources to finding the best talent:
Many companies face deep organizational challenges in terms of aligning their marketing initiatives with their customer’s decision journey. This is certainly the case with large organizations but also with small and medium sized businesses.
In a recent McKinsey & Company article, they surveyed executives across 20 industries about the role of digital in their companies and found a startling difference between the high and low performers. With best-in-class companies 70% of managers could identify and speak to their digital KPIs, indicating that their digital marketing efforts are a priority for the company.
“When it comes to measuring impact of digital spend through effective ROI techniques, the best-in-class companies can measure the impact of 85% of their digital spend. For those in the bottom quartile, it’s 10% again.” – McKinsey & Company
While this survey mostly concentrated on bigger businesses, SMEs should definitely take note and look to emulate what the best-in-class companies are doing in terms of shifting their focus around the customer’s path to purchase and making sure their marketing and IT departments are informed and working together
Here are some key elements on shifting priorities to concentrate on that consumer journey: (McKinsey & Company)
Cross-functional alignment
On consumer decision journey, digital strategy, goals
Project management support
With engaged executive team
Talent development & recruitment
Analytics, experiential design, mindset evolution
Responsive flexibility
To the market, to results, evolution of customers
Test and learn
Relentless part of the operational DNA, culture shift
Here’s a presentation by David Edelman speaking to this subject:
