Developing a clearly defined digital marketing ecosystem is essential to fully realizing the benefit of all digital activities within an organization. Digital marketing strategies, and the myriad of tactics to support them, are rampantly spreading through all marketing departments of a corporation: e-commerce, individual brand groups, CRM, corporate promotions, etc. Furthermore, these departments are implementing these activities internationally as well. This results in many different digital organisms that exist within a corporation. This article discusses the need for an organized digital ecosystem.

Developers and software companies tend to take a holistic view of the digital ecosystem, and there are conferences and blogs dedicated to this topic. However, they don’t discuss, in depth, the fact that marketing communication opportunities and issues exist within the digital ecosystem. To identify and address these, a corporate marketing lead needs to take a holistic approach and view their marketing activities as part of a digital ecosystem. By applying their marketing lens to the digital marketing ecosystem, profits can be maximized. I believe this process of defining a corporate marketing ecosystem should become a new layer of optimization within corporate marketing.

To begin optimization of the digital marketing organisms, within a digital ecosystem, marketers need to become digital ecologists. They need to study the relationship between all of the digital marketing organisms and their digital and human environments.

To begin this study, digital marketing ecologists need to have a comprehensive understanding of how the digital organisms currently operate within the framework of the digital ecosystem. As a start, two different schematics, and correlating analysis, need to be created:

• Create a schematic that outlines all digital organisms and map how they connect to each other.
• Outline all offline communications, and overlay how these affect all of the digital organisms.

Once the schematics have been developed, a comprehensive understanding of how the digital marketing organisms operate can be achieved, and an in-depth analysis can take place. Identification of opportunities and issues will emerge, and digital ecosystem optimization can begin.

For a digital strategy consultant that understands how to assess and optimize the digital marketing ecosystem, please contact jenni@weluvdigital.com or 323.828.8137