Lynne Seid, Sector Leader
In today's intensely revenue-focused environment, customer engagement has become a primary marketing strategy. Through customer acquisition efforts, loyalty programs, and up-selling and cross-selling current customers, marketers seek to broaden and deepen relationships with customers. Increasingly, senior marketing officers want to deploy more digital resources against these engagement strategies, given the reach of digital marketing and the ability to measure results more finitely than in any other medium. They also see great potential for leveraging customer information and customer relationship management derived from digital marketing by integrating it into the business ecosystem.
But as their companies evolve from traditional marketing models and elevate digital marketing to a key position in their businesses, a major stumbling block stands in the way: a lack of digital talent. Marketers increasingly cite their difficulty in developing and acquiring the digital talent they need to formulate growth-generating programs. A large majority of senior executives, who feel that today's Chief Marketing Officer (CMO ) should be proficient in digital marketing, echo the concerns of the marketers.
*This talent shortage has placed a premium on finding best-in-class marketing and digital marketing leadership.
To help companies address these critical human capital needs in digital marketing, the Heidrick & Struggles Digital Marketing Practice provides comprehensive services in talent management and executive search. We are committed to staying at the forefront of the rapid evolution of digital marketing, maintaining thought-leadership through such activities as our ongoing Digital Roundtables with top CMOs, our relationship with Forrester Research, and our forthcoming Survey of The State of Digital Marketing. We also maintain relationships with key digital marketing talent and benchmark them through a rigorous Digital Talent Scorecard, enabling us to identify appropriate talent quickly and confidently. The value of our approach can be seen most clearly in our work building out the leadership teams of some of the pre-eminent digital companies in the world, including Hewlett Packard, Bloomberg, Activision, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon.
* Heidrick & Struggles/Digital Scientists: The State of Digital Marketing Survey 2009