Any fool worth their weight knows not having a digital presence is commercial suicide, and you would struggle to find a business today not on the web. But as technology advances, people don't just consume digital content, they want to experience it, touch it, and integrate it with their lives. So if you can’t offer them an almost tangible experience, you might as well shut up shop and go home.
Wherever you turn these days, there is content. On public transport, in fast food restaurants, on our smart devices, and they won’t even let you watch a YouTube video about skateboarding squirrels without trying to sell you something! How do you cut through all of this noise and connect with your audience? It must be like fighting a losing battle, right? Wrong. If you want to connect with your audience, you have to do it on their terms. And that’s exactly where digital transformation comes in.
Flicking the Right Buttons
It is necessary to understand why you should go through digital transformation. It is not just buying some digital tools, plugging them into your system, pressing a big red button, and sitting back while your company ticks along nicely with zero effort from you. It is the very core of your business, and you must know how your day-to-day business operations will and should be affected, the impact on strategy if you have one (if you don’t, you will need one pretty darn quick), and the impact on your business model.
Then there are the other outcomes it will cause. It inspires your staff because they see that your firm is progressive, better connected, and keeping up with the trends. Proper research of these consequences and defining your goals mean you can measure how effective your transformation is, and avoid unpleasant surprises caused because you neglected to do your homework. You should look at the talent and strengths of the team you already have in place, and tap into it and nurture it to make the transition as seamless as possible.
Other Considerations
Now, you know how much we love GDPR on this blog and this is a very key issue when choosing what kind of tools you should be using to give you the advantage with being compliant. The new regulation actually gives you a good excuse, and in fact a legal requirement, to look at your technical stack and see how you can make mapping the data flow as effective as possible. Companies collect a lot of data about their visitors, but just throwing it all up in the air and not knowing where it lands is reckless. Using digital transformation to optimize the data you collect, right down to the last digital detail, will result in removing the barriers to completed online forms, but you are considering what information is essential, and shortening the process for visitor completion. And by showing that you are a conscientious advocate of respecting your visitors’ data will paint you in a positive light with your potential and existing customers. Gathering relevant information from visitors means gaining insight into who they are. And when you have an accurate picture of them, then you can use this to really hone in on the type of goods and content that would fit into their lifestyle choices, and communicate it to them on their level.
Stand and Deliver!
To take it further, in terms of how you should define digital transformation, it means identifying a content strategy based on the needs of your target audience, creating the content that engages them, through a true understanding of the channels and ways to reach them, and setting KPIs necessary that measure the success. When you establish the touch points across all channels, online and offline, you want to track, and use that to optimize the customer journey, you can identify those tools that will allow you to gather the necessary data to optimize your content strategies. It gives your marketing the injection of amazing essential to surpass your expectations.
OK, Who Kicks It All Off?
There is no one person that should lead it. Usually, in more mature companies, the head of IT makes recommendations when it comes to new technology. But bringing in the know-how of the boss of marketing to identify the content strategy, and the sales director to discuss frankly the product’s USPs, and use their knowledge of the customer to define the digital touchpoints, as well as the CEO to give their official stamp of approval. These roles all have a positive impact on the adoption and progression of the mammoth task to come throughout the company and the many roles within it.
Segmentation Is Not Just for Grapefruit
Now you have the right technology, you can segment your customers using their behavior and character traits, and integrate your e-commerce and multichannel strategies to delight your customer and give your sales revenue a sizeable boost. In this day and age, you’ve got to be consistently delivering a user experience that goes beyond your customers’ expectations, and that means across all devices and channels. The advantage to you is that this digital presence gives you a real single customer view. Without these tools, the essential components of your digital brand marketing strategy will be missing. And this will mean you are not able to integrate the client data you gather with your email data via your CRM. But when you can keep your business vision aligned with a complete understanding of customers and digital trends, you are more or less establishing yourself as a brand-leading multichannel business. And if this is seen through to its correct conclusion, you can say “hello” to reaching your strategic objectives.
But I Am Happy Doing What I’m Doing
Are you crazy? Don’t let the complexity of digital transformation put you off. My colleague Pavel has been writing some very useful blog posts to show you what you can achieve when you use the right tools that Kentico EMS gives you. I am sure that these blog posts are an eye-opener for some, and a cause for smug satisfaction for others that are already using the same tools to give them a business and financial advantage.
Not going through digital transformation speaks volumes about your business. It tells your customers that you are not interested in them. And when customers have awkward and impersonal experiences, they take their business and money elsewhere. Your competition is everywhere, and the smarter cats are already using the tools more complacent companies lack to steal the business from under their noses. Don’t be the one that has to turn out the lights when you leave a business that thought that digital transformation wasn’t necessary. Be the one that switches them on in a shiny new building built on the success your customers’ loyalty has built. After all, success has a sweet smell, and failure just stinks at every level. And you deserve better than that!
If you would like to explore the topics in this article further, you can download our whitepaper on human-to-human marketing.
Have you gone through digital transformation? What were the surprising steps that you encountered? Maybe you have some tips you would like to share with others who are about to face this themselves. Whatever your experience, opinions, or questions about the topics raised in this article, I would love to hear about them in the discussion below. Don’t be shy!