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DMI Expert: Strategy and Leadership

DMI Expert · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Strategy and Leadership

What this domain tests

Strategy and leadership questions ask you to connect business goals to digital execution. The exam probes market and customer analysis (PESTLE, SWOT, journey mapping), objective setting (OKRs, SMART), business models, governance, budgeting, measurement, team design, and change management. The theme is prioritisation: why this segment, this proposition, this channel mix, this sequence.

Core rules

  • Diagnose before planning: use PESTLE for external forces, SWOT to combine internal capability with market context, and journey maps to locate friction. A SWOT list without prioritised implications is not strategy.
  • Set outcomes, not outputs. 'Increase qualified pipeline by 20%' beats 'publish 12 blogs'. OKRs should have one measurable objective and 3-5 key results.
  • Choose a coherent channel mix. Match channel role to funnel stage: search captures demand; content and social create it; CRM and email retain it. Fund the mix by marginal return, not habit.
  • Define governance: RACI for decisions, data ownership, brand guardrails, consent and privacy controls, and a martech roadmap with clear owners.
  • Plan for adoption. In-housing, agency models, and new tooling fail without capability building, incentives, and a stakeholder coalition.

Worked example

A team has £700k. Paid search projects 2,000 leads at £250 CAC; content projects 500 leads at £400 CAC. Raw CAC favours search. But 30% of search leads become sales-qualified, versus 70% of content leads. Qualified CAC is £250/0.30 = £833 for search; £400/0.70 = £571 for content. Content is cheaper per qualified lead. The decision is not 'all content': capacity and saturation matter. Fund content until its marginal qualified CAC rises above search, then split. Show the maths, not just the preference.

Traps

Vanity metrics, tactics before objectives, cost per lead without lead quality, single-touch attribution, ignoring sales capacity, treating compliance as a legal afterthought, and copying competitor channel mixes without their brand or budget.