Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence best practices

Techniques for how to launch and manage a Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence to increase efficiency and skill depth across your business.

How will this Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence guide help me and my business?

The role of a Digital CoE is to maximize the potential opportunities of digital media and technology to meet the multichannel marketing goals of an organization. A DCoE or Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence is often a key part of digital transformation projects since it encourages adoption of best practice in deploying relevant digital media, experiences, insight and technology across an organization.

A digital CoE can increase efficiency, develop skills and have drastic improvements right across the business.

This guide will inform how to launch, manage and improve a digital CoE and how you can make the most of it right across the business.

Is a digital CoE for you?

Gartner recommends using this checklist to gauge if a CoE is right for your organization. COEs are worth exploring when these conditions exist:

• Specific capabilities are needed
• Specialized knowledge is required
• Knowledge is difficult to acquire
• The capability is important to the business
• Central oversight is required
• Organization culture and size align to the CoE model
• The capability is relatively homogeneous

Although many of the examples of DCoE we include in this briefing are global mega-brands like 3M, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson and Unilever, we believe and know from members we talk to who have a DCoE that the 18 techniques we explain in this briefing are relevant to all types of businesses where multiple people need to be developing their skills in managing and optimizing digital marketing.

Who is this guide for?

This briefing is aimed at businesses setting up a digital marketing CoE for the first time or reviewing how their CoE is run. It is most relevant for current heads of marketing or heads of digital marketing in larger organizations who are making the case for a DCoE and want to know how to shape it. It will also be useful for more senior managers who want to review the case.

The guide gives a checklist of all the potential challenges involved in managing the process for creating and running a digital marketing Centre of Excellence and gives recommendations on best practices.

It may also be useful for larger agencies with larger clients who may be supporting them through a transformation process. Agencies will also often be undergoing their own digital transformation and will have similar challenges of knowledge sharing and training from the most digitally savvy to the least digitally savvy team members.

The approach of reviewing the main activities that a digital specialist or agency can support are also relevant for smaller businesses too. 

How is this guide structured?

The Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence best practices guide includes:

• What is a Digital CoE?
• Who is using Digital Marketing Centre’s of Excellence?
• DCoE functions
• 18 success factors for a DCoE
• Creating a business case for a DCoE
• Alternatives to a DCoE

Resource Details

Resource Details

About the author

Dr. Dave Chaffey

Dave is co-founder of Smart Insights and creator of the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. He has consulted and trained for many businesses including large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses.  For his full profile, or to connect on LinkedIn or other social networks, see the About Dave Chaffey profile page on Smart Insights. Dave is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. He has been recognized by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing.