We poll our members every year asking about their digital plans. Our 2016 research into managing digital marketing found 47% of businesses are doing digital marketing without any kind of digital marketing strategy. It's interesting to see how this compares to digital strategies more broadly in larger organisations.
Harvey Nash and KPMG surveyed over 3,300 Cheif Information Officers and Technology Leaders about IT management, in the largest survey of its kind in the world. Their findings related to digital strategy make for interesting reading, and corroborate closely with the results of our survey into digital marketing strategies. 42% of businesses surveyed by Harvey Nash and KPMG didn't have a digital strategy in place at all in 2016, similar to the 47% we found without a digital marketing strategy this year.
Interestingly, many of those that had developed a digital strategy hadn't managed to implement it across the whole company, with a quarter of businesses only implementing digital strategies within individual business units. This is better than no strategy at all, but can lead to silos developing where knowledge gained is not shared across the business. IT leaders need to aim for fully integrated digital strategies which span the whole company in 2016. With 87% of businesses either working on a digital strategy or already implementing it, not developing one is a recipe for falling behind.
By Robert Allen
Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.
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