Happy New Year to y’all!
Happy new year AND happy new job for me! Thank you to all my industry friends who have been so supportive as I took this journey to find my next opportunity. And a very special shout out to the amazing DJ Waldow, aka Coach DJ, who took me on as a career transition client and helped me to not only rediscover my passion but also vet the many opportunities that came my way (I feel very blessed).
Drum roll please…
Earlier this month I joined Digital Prism Advisors LLC, also known as dprism, as Managing Director, Digital Marketing. Our area of expertise is Digital Transformation.
There are many different definitions of Digital Transformation; here’s how I see it.
Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is helping clients develop and actualize a cohesive and over-arching digital strategy to improve their organizations’ bottom line performance. This includes:
- Finding better ways to execute existing digital initiatives which are successful
- Eliminating existing digital initiatives that are not successful – or modifying them to make them successful
- Identifying and implementing new digital initiatives with a high chance of success
A successful digital transformation engages every group within an organization, including content, IT, marketing and the executive suite – and it results in a digital-centric vision being developed and successfully implemented for the business and its future success.
Huh?
I imagine that right now many of my friends in the email marketing industry are either (a) scratching their heads, (b) clicking through to learn more about Digital Prism Advisors, (c) Googling the term “Digital Transformation” or (d) all of the above. Many people over the past few weeks have ventured guesses as to where I’d land — and I’ve told everyone that they would never in a million years get it right.
Many of you may feel like this is coming out of left field. But for me this is actually a ‘circling back’ in a couple ways.
First, I worked with Adriaan Bouten, CEO of Digital Prism, back in the mid-1990s. We were both at Congressional Quarterly (CQ) right around the time the World Wide Web made the Internet user-friendly enough for the masses. His ‘Big Island’ project united the IT, editorial and marketing teams in presenting CQ content online — it was more than a Website, it was a new way of managing, presenting and marketing content and creating systems to leverage it to the company’s bottom line advantage (read: revenue, which has always been near and dear to my heart).
Second, it’s also a circling back with regard to what I will be doing. I love email and I always will. Through the course of my job search I spoke with representatives from:
- all of the large email marketing agencies, as well as a few of the smaller boutique firms
- a number of vendors in the email marketing space
- some consultancies specializing in strategy and technical email marketing services
- many other ‘100% email’ organizations
And I really thought that I would continue my career in an organization with a business model focused on email marketing.
But as much as I love email, there is more to digital marketing. I began my career in the late 1980s with CompuServe and moved up through the publishing industry. Before I focused on email in 2000 (and even at times since then) I was involved in all types of digital marketing — I did strategy for and managed:
- display advertising
- search engine optimization
- search engine marketing
- social media communication
- Website redesigns
- other online and offline initiatives.
Email marketing is still the most effective channel in terms of Return-on-Investment (ROI), but all these other types of digital marketing initiatives can — when done well — also drive revenue and contribute to an organization’s bottom line success.
None of these digital channels operates in a vacuum — and it’s the synergies between them that can make or break a digital marketing program. So I’m excited that I will, once again, be able to leverage all of these as I improve bottom line performance for clients.
The other critical element to digital marketing success are technology, data management and system integration. I’d be lying if I said that I could lead a team myself to make these work. Which is why I am so happy to join dprism. They have expertise in these areas to make the back-end systems do what they need to do to support the front-end digital marketing strategy and tactics.
dprism is a relatively new organization but they already has some big name, enterprise-sized clients — and I look forward to contributing to their continued success.
I’d Love to Speak with You
I’ve always been happy to talk email marketing with anyone that wanted to discuss it. But today my standard offer along these lines expands: if you’d like to learn more about email and/or digital marketing, digital transformation or dprism, shoot me an email or give me a call.
I’d love to learn more about your organization’s digital marketing challenges, chat about what a true, formal digital transformation does for a business — and discuss how dprism might be able to help your organization.
All the best and much success in 2015!
Jeanne
JJ@JeanneJennings.com
202.365.0423
