by Jamie Tolentino
With companies feeling the demand to go digital, it is only practical that companies invest in the resources required for them to deliver in the digital space. However, not every company might need a Chief Technology Officer or Digital Department just yet. Forming these roles and teams obviously depend on the size and operational remit of the company to assess whether this is needed or if this is the way forward. Still, there are some important things to bear in mind when resourcing for digital.
Have a digital strategy in place
A company should know what they want to be doing digitally for the next year and a vague plan of action through to the next five years. Is digital marketing a core marketing activity? Is there a digital product to supplement the physical offering? Is there a digital service to help acquire or retain new customers to the physical products? If there is currently no expertise in-house to draw up the strategy, there are strategic agencies or consultancies that may be able to help. However, it is very important to have a senior sponsor sign off on the digital strategy, so that he or she may be able to understand the resource requirements needed later on.
Estimate the resources required to carry out strategy
Depending on what you want to achieve, you need to figure out where the digital resource will sit. Details like which team they will sit under or if they will form a separate digital team will have to be decided on. If your company culture is one where people can move around, you may want to implant a digital person in existing teams to better understand how the existing team operates and then form a separate digital team later on. You can also start with hiring one or two digital specialists and have them mostly outsource the work if possible to determine how many people they need if they were to take it in-house.
Train people in digital
In some cases, the existing staff would need to be trained up to use new digital tools. For example, moving from phone customer support to web customer support is not that big of a jump. However, answering queries would have to be in a separate form digitally, and logging the queries would be in a different format. Depending on the number of queries you get, or the areas of customer support you have, you might want to have a couple of people trained to answer both phone and web, or specialize in either phone or web. However, it is important for all the information to be joined up.
Make sure sub-teams are integrated
If there is a department where there is a digital team, make sure that they are properly integrated with the rest of the team so each team doesn’t go off and do their own thing and unnecessarily duplicate efforts. For example, if your marketing team has a new campaign requirement and you need new assets created, it would make sense for the digital and offline team to share the assets.
Staff up as required
How slow or how fast you need to hire depends on your digital strategy. If you’re just building out a digital marketing team, you might have more leeway than someone trying to build out a whole digital product team to rival your competitor’s product. However, one thing to note is that digital specialists are more of a niche than traditional roles so the quality of the hire is very important.
Illustration by Edward Joson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jamie Tolentino works as a digital marketer at a global asset management firm. She writes for TNW (The Next Web) and blogs on the Huffington Post UK.
This article was first published in the November-December 2016 issue of adobo magazine.
