As your online pres­ence becomes larg­er and the algo­rithms in the search engines and social media become more com­plex, is it time to look at adding a Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cer (CDO) to your in-house team? Here’s why a CDO can be essen­tial to your com­pa­ny’s growth and prof­its.

As dig­i­tal mar­keters (SEOs) we fre­quent­ly inter­face and inter­face fre­quent­ly with the com­pa­nies for which we do work.

In small­er brands and busi­ness­es this is usu­al­ly one per­son; the own­er, pres­i­dent, or busi­ness man­ag­er will be our chan­nel of com­mu­ni­ca­tion when help­ing the com­pa­ny make site changes to ben­e­fit their dig­i­tal pres­ence and web­site vis­i­bil­i­ty.

How­ev­er, there often isn’t such an equal­ly straight line of imple­men­ta­tion when work­ing with larg­er com­pa­nies. When work­ing with larg­er cor­po­ra­tions we typ­i­cal­ly deal with two com­pa­ny silos: mar­ket­ing and IT. Occa­sion­al­ly there is an in-house SEO team or in-house SEO, but they are still liv­ing under the mar­ket­ing group in most cas­es and there is lit­tle inter­ac­tion.

Split Effort

For the mar­ket­ing group this means that in addi­tion to their usu­al duties such as offline/online adver­tis­ing, pub­lic rela­tions, cor­po­rate brand­ing and iden­ti­ty devel­op­ment the mar­ket­ing chan­nel is respon­si­ble for the front-fac­ing por­tion of the company’s online pres­ence. This entails details such as web con­tent, web design, dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing, and social media.

When it comes to the IT depart­ment, their jobs are also sim­i­lar­ly split between typ­i­cal work tasks (e.g., serv­er admin­is­tra­tion and cor­po­rate secu­ri­ty) and those relat­ed to the web­site pres­ence (e.g., such as ana­lyt­ics imple­men­ta­tion and page speed).

On the sur­face this seems a per­fect­ly rea­son­able divi­sion of labor. Mar­ket­ing should con­trol the cor­po­rate pres­ence and IT should main­tain the plat­form the mar­ket­ing group uses.

What seems rea­son­able and what actu­al­ly works are often two dif­fer­ent things, how­ev­er.

Too often this divi­sion means con­flict­ing ideas or the major­i­ty of what needs to be done falls through the cracks and only “what we can fit in our sched­ule” issues get resolved. It also means the per­son in charge of facil­i­tat­ing your changes, your dig­i­tal mar­keter, has no pow­er or author­i­ty to make sure those changes occur.

What Is A Chief Digital Officer?

Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cers (CDOs) are basi­cal­ly your best SEOs grown-up and off to the exec­u­tive offices with a rarely worn suit and tie.

The Rus­sell Reynolds Exec­u­tive Search (one of the top five exec­u­tive search com­pa­nies in the coun­try) describes the CDO as pos­sess­ing the fol­low­ing:

“CDO can­di­dates should be famil­iar with web, mobile and social media — and pos­si­bly local as well. They should be able to plan and exe­cute long-term strat­e­gy around dri­ving cus­tomer aware­ness, engage­ment, expe­ri­ence and mon­e­ti­za­tion. When it comes to inno­va­tion, can­di­dates should have expe­ri­ence devel­op­ing new chan­nels and busi­ness mod­els, as well as inno­v­a­tive prod­ucts and ser­vices. The CDO also must be tech savvy; though know­ing how to code may or may not be required, the abil­i­ty to man­age devel­op­ers and ask the right ques­tions is a min­i­mum require­ment.”

Uti­liz­ing these core com­pe­ten­cies:

“As with any senior lead­er­ship posi­tion, a range of com­pe­ten­cies is required:

• Set­ting strat­e­gy. With the dig­i­tal land­scape evolv­ing so quick­ly, CDOs need to have excel­lent strate­gic skills, with the abil­i­ty to chart the right course and make agile alter­ations when need­ed.
• Exe­cut­ing for results. Strate­gic insight must be cou­pled with a strong exe­cu­tion ori­en­ta­tion and an abil­i­ty to deliv­er results despite the com­plex and flu­id envi­ron­ment.
• Build­ing rela­tion­ships and using influ­ence. In today’s cli­mate, the cul­ture and prac­tices with­in a busi­ness can change as quick­ly as those in the exter­nal mar­ket. Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cers, there­fore, must be able to build rela­tion­ships across all lev­els and func­tions of the orga­ni­za­tion – from the Board down to the front line – and effec­tive­ly man­age con­flict.
• Lead­er­ship. CDOs must in turn be able to recruit top tal­ent and to lead large and (some­times) glob­al­ly dis­trib­uted teams.
• Demon­strat­ing cul­tur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant, as those skilled in new dig­i­tal tools may view the world dif­fer­ent­ly from oth­ers in more tra­di­tion­al parts of the busi­ness.”

Why Do You Need A CDO?

A Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cer is a leader with an immense amount of dig­i­tal exper­tise. They aren’t mere­ly over­seers; they are doers with an active skill set that goes beyond plan­ning and man­age­ment.

Your CDO will know how to get results because they have done the work; they have achieved suc­cess for them­selves, their com­pa­nies, and their clients. A qual­i­fied CDO will know the secrets that only liv­ing in a uni­verse can teach you.

A CDO can be essen­tial to com­pa­ny growth and prof­its.

So while we know there are great ben­e­fits to hav­ing a CDO, what are the issues of not hav­ing one? Why do you need yet anoth­er C‑level exec­u­tive?

Not hav­ing a CDO can result in issues that will range from small to large, depend­ing on your staff’s expe­ri­ence and exper­tise, but gen­er­al­ly fall into these three cat­e­gories:

1. Cohesive Strategy Issues

Lack of a CDO means no one group or per­son in your orga­ni­za­tion can devel­op, imple­ment, or test a com­pre­hen­sive online dig­i­tal strat­e­gy. The death knell of any dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing plan is the lack of a com­plete pic­ture. With­out this com­plete pic­ture and the abil­i­ty to affect all aspects, the plan is like­ly to fail to reach the hoped for gains and expect­ed goals.

2. Knowledge, Experience Issues

With­out a CDO the com­pa­ny has no one per­son who has worked most­ly (or even only) in the dig­i­tal land­scape for as many years as there has been one, or at least almost as many. There is a lev­el of exper­tise that can­not be learned from any book or train­ing. Part of being an excel­lent dig­i­tal mar­keter is know­ing those things that are nev­er pub­lished and often only talked about under NDAs or at con­fer­ence bars.

Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, search engines, social media and the land­scape in which they live changes near­ly every day – some­times even many times in a day. A CDO will have years of knowl­edge and know-how that is just not pos­si­ble to obtain when your job takes you in and out of the dig­i­tal space as with the mar­ket­ing and IT groups. It is not that those groups can’t know, but they have oth­er things they should be doing, this is not their wheel­house and the argu­ment can be eas­i­ly made that it should not be.

Free­ing your inter­nal groups up to spend their time in their space means your mar­ket­ing and IT groups can do what you hired them for in the first place and not be over­taxed and under­staffed try­ing to work in two dif­fer­ent fields at once.

3. Singular Authority

With­out a CDO, there is often an inter­nal issue where there is a dis­sim­i­lar­i­ty of knowl­edge at best and com­pe­ti­tion between depart­ments at worst. This means that you have two groups approach­ing your web­site and dig­i­tal vis­i­bil­i­ty strate­gies from dif­fer­ent and often con­flict­ing per­spec­tives.

Divid­ing the work and leav­ing no one group in charge with clear con­trol over who makes changes, how they make changes, when then make changes, and most impor­tant­ly what changes to make, is a recipe for medi­oc­rity at best.

In the end, the divid­ed approach often leaves the two ver­ti­cals with­in in a com­pa­ny bat­tling for resources and access. The mar­ket­ing group won’t allow the IT group time and the IT group won’t allow the mar­ket­ing group access. It becomes the red tape that stops the wheel from turn­ing.

The process­es and work involved aren’t dual­i­ties, but sin­gle sides of the same coin. With­out the com­pound, which molds the sides togeth­er into one, they can lose their val­ue.

In the Real World

After speak­ing at SXSWi, a direc­tor of mar­ket­ing for a large tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny came up to ask me why their new site was­n’t per­form­ing as they expect­ed. When I looked at the site it took about two min­utes to tell him that their brand new site, while beau­ti­ful, was not like­ly to ever per­form well.

A bit shocked he asked why.

I told him that there were no clear calls to action, the page was con­fus­ing, and there were no clear val­ue propo­si­tions. It was also easy to see it would­n’t per­form well in search.

Want­i­ng to be help­ful, I sug­gest­ed he cre­ate a page with clear com­par­a­tive val­ue propo­si­tions and pric­ing with a sim­ple buy but­ton in a nice col­or of their test­ed choice.

He looked sur­prised and told me that they actu­al­ly were A/B test­ing a page just like that (their old page) and it was killing the new one con­vert­ing at near­ly 3x the rate.

How could a com­pa­ny this large and this well known, in the tech­ni­cal space nonethe­less, have such huge onsite con­ver­sion issues? How did it hap­pen that no one from the CMO to the direc­tor down to the project man­ag­er caught this? They didn’t because it was not their wheel­house.

There is a com­mon and per­va­sive myth that just because mar­keters know adver­tis­ing or tech­nol­o­gists know code that this means they are qual­i­fied to run a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing effort. Most often they are not. Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing entails so many more para­me­ters than both com­bined.

Dig­i­tal is its own ani­mal, not a tech/marketing hybrid split eas­i­ly down the mid­dle.

In this case, the com­pa­ny spent hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars cre­at­ing some­thing that was pret­ty on paper, but didn’t work in the online world.

What if there had been a CDO and a team of their pick­ing who could have also seen the issues with­in the site they cre­at­ed in the same two min­utes? How much mon­ey would they have saved and how many hours could they have put toward oth­er projects that would make them real dol­lars?

CMOs are not CDOs. The two should not be con­fused.

Your online pres­ence requires, even demands there be a cen­tral dig­i­tal strat­e­gy in place. This strat­e­gy must be formed, devel­oped, and imple­ment­ed by some­one who knows the entire pic­ture, not just a piece of it. They must be able to exe­cute it with an under­stand­ing of how all parts inte­grate and syn­er­gize. With­out this com­pre­hen­sive knowl­edge and exe­cu­tion, often what seems right just isn’t.

The SEO And CDO

CDOs aren’t just knowl­edge­able about your dig­i­tal pres­ence, but also retain all the exper­tise that is need­ed to prop­er­ly run an entire divi­sion of a com­pa­ny and make that divi­sion suc­cess­ful. This makes find­ing a qual­i­fied per­son dif­fi­cult.

Most peo­ple who would best qual­i­fy for the role are search engine opti­miza­tion pro­fes­sion­als (dig­i­tal mar­keters) with a breadth of on-site, tech­ni­cal, off-site, and social skills as well as deep under­stand­ings in the work­ings of client and employ­ee man­age­ment. This does­n’t mean, how­ev­er, that these dig­i­tal mar­keters would meet the qual­i­fi­ca­tions to be a C‑level exec­u­tive.

Yet when com­pa­nies have to choose one or the oth­er, the qual­i­fi­ca­tions are often more heav­i­ly weight­ed in favor of the skills at the C‑level and not that of a dig­i­tal expert. This is a mis­take on the company’s part.

Not under­stand­ing the dig­i­tal space today costs com­pa­nies in users and dol­lars – many users and many dol­lars.

If tal­ent is scarce and you have to choose which area of exper­tise to go easy on, choose the C‑level expe­ri­ence. A true dig­i­tal mar­keter with the expe­ri­ence to qual­i­fy for the posi­tion will be well versed in the base skills need­ed for the C‑level man­age­ment.

With this base you can train and devel­op a can­di­date into the exec­u­tive you want them to be and much more quick­ly than you can turn them into a prop­er dig­i­tal expert. Both are dif­fi­cult, but only dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing changes 24 hours a day, sev­en days a week, and 365 days a year.

Don’t Cheat Yourself

Nev­er cheat your­self on a CDO who lacks the nec­es­sary expe­ri­ence in the dig­i­tal space to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive strate­gic plan with the knowl­edge to exe­cute that plan. If a CDO does­n’t know about man­ag­ing and imple­ment­ing web­sites in both desk­top and mobile, how to pro­duce a prop­er search engine opti­miza­tion strat­e­gy, how to cre­ate great social engage­ment, and low­er your cost on paid adver­tise­ments while improv­ing user traf­fic and site stick­i­ness, then you’re cheat­ing your­self.

If the CDO doesn’t know why cer­tain tech­nolo­gies cause crawler issues and how the col­or of a but­ton can increase your con­ver­sions X per­cent, and can’t tell you how to avoid a Google penal­ty or why infi­nite scroll prob­a­bly isn’t the best idea, you’re wast­ing your time.

The knowl­edge base for a CDO is vast and deep. Their pres­ence will save your com­pa­ny from big mis­takes that can cost you time and mon­ey. Get one today!

How impor­tant do you think a Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cer is to a com­pa­ny’s dig­i­tal suc­cess?