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Service objectives

The following list represents the Key Service Objectives (KSO) for the Appleton Greene Digital Strategy service.

Be Strategic

 The highest priority objective is to help your organization operate more strategically and redirect energy to higher return activities. Executives will be able to shift focus from the transactional weeds and apply their expertise to enhancing the vision and equipping the organization to achieve strategic goals. Organizational teams will be able to redirect their energy from working around inefficiencies and quagmires and apply their talents instead to upstream, high impact activities. Effective digitalization improves the quality and availability of critical information and harnesses technology to leverage that information throughout the organization and external ecosystem so that your organization can realize increased, higher quality results with less resource.


Operate Intelligently

 It’s all too easy to get sucked into the tactical details of executing strategy. Though simple in construct, APEX is designed to help avoid developing tunnel vision so that highest-level objectives, challenges and tactical steps to achieve goals and mitigate obstacles are routinely top of mind throughout key functions and practice areas. Additionally, effective digitalization improves decision making speed and accuracy by ensuring critical data is accurate, timely and accessible.


Improve Profitability

 By implementing digital transformation with front-loaded, highest impact focus in each functional and practice area throughout the organization organizational profitability can be maximized.


Optimize Marketing

 The breadth and depth of marketing as a strategy is often misunderstood; causing marketing strategy to be underutilized. For example, marketing may be considered synonymous with branding in some organizations and defined as advertising in others. Marketing’s over-arching objective is to enhance profitability. While both branding and advertising fall within the spectrum of marketing they are only two of many ways marketing can help optimize profitability. In addition to the tactics which are intuitively considered marketing, marketing needs to function outside the core marketing tactics as well to coordinate with and support the other practice areas such as sales, HR, operations, IT and data management in defining organizational strategy and achieving optimal profitability. APEX will help expose opportunities to fully leverage marketing across the organization. APEX applied to marketing-specific functions will focus on identifying which tactics should be prioritized in the mix and how to realize highest value from those initiatives. For example, a company entering a highly competitive market with established, aggressive leaders may need to focus less on branding and SEO because it will take longer for those tactics to yield results. They may still belong in the mix but priority may need to shift towards more direct initiatives that have a better chance of displacing competitors. We will need to focus heavily on the overall health of your digital presence because both search engines and your customers are relying on what the social sphere is saying about your organization to determine your relevance and value. Likewise, your customers are less influenced by corporate marketing. They trust people who have interacted with your organization and give more credence to what they’re saying. This reality needs to be managed both proactively and reactively. Proactively, we need to implement programs that entice your customers to share feedback about their experience with your organization. Obviously we need to treat them well so that their feedback is positive but even if they share frustration about their experience we can win good-will by publicly correcting the issues in that social channel, which brings us to “reactive”. Nothing can impair your ability to win customers faster than negative feedback and people are much more likely to complain than they are to praise. Reactive management means quickly and deliberately finding negative commentary about your organization, executives, personnel and products that may prevent customers from doing business with you and addressing those issues. In some cases fixing the issue may simply mean responding to the complaint. In other cases it may require removing the comments from view through more concentrated reputation repair techniques. We will follow the APEX process to determine the best marketing mix, how to integrate offline marketing into online channels, how to move forward and optimize marketing execution and how to align marketing with the broader organizational functions.


Integrate Technologies

 To a great degree corporate optimization depends on the level of connectivity your organization has to your stakeholders so that data can flow in, through and back out into the ecosystem ensuring fluid, data rich workflow that can be analyzed and actioned effectively. We will use the APEX process to evaluate digital properties, mobile interfaces, marketing technologies, business technologies and the other solutions to identify choke points and opportunities to improve.