This is the third article in a series about digital transformation and its impact on business operations. Other articles include:
- What's The Deal With Digital Transformation?
- Why is Digital Transformation for Sales so important?
- How Digital Transformation is Driving Customer Success
The new normal has people working remotely. Consumers and businesses alike are spending more time consuming content and operating online. Having a well designed and maintained website has gone from a nice to have to a base requirement for businesses across the world. As a result, over the last two decades, targeted digital marketing has gone from a luxury afforded by the Fortune 500, to a relatively easy service that even amateur comedians and savvy local businesses can take advantage of. Digital marketing is an essential ingredient to grow not only your brand recognition but also your customer base.
It is more critical than ever for businesses to transform their digital marketing to deliver the right content and messaging to the right people.
It is more critical than ever for businesses to transform their digital marketing to deliver the right content and messaging to the right people. But what does it mean to transform your digital marketing systems and processes? In this article we will dive into the key components to assess and transform your marketing efforts and maximize your ad spend.
Tear Down Your Silos
Like any functioning relationship, your systems, databases, and tools must also effectively communicate with one another. If your tools and data are all operating in silos, it is very easy to miss out on the bigger picture. Having to manually bridge the data and information across multiple systems makes it near impossible to track individual customer journeys. As a result, you lose valuable prospects. An unsavory by-product is that you and your staff need to reconcile the data from different systems manually, which is an unsustainable amount of tedious labor. The poor returns and mind numbing work will eventually have a toxic impact on the very culture of your business, specifically data centricity. Over time, this can lead to increasingly poor and inaccurate data recording practices by your staff.
Depending on your industry, data warehouses or a CRM integrated with an AI sales platform can effectively bridge the valleys between your silos. Integrated automation tools will make data collection seamless. Connecting business intelligence software with your data will help you get a better overall picture of your customer base and ensure all your prospects generated through your marketing spend are converted into customers. Overtime, this will lead to an easier account rounding process by increasing the quantity of product or services sold to existing customers.
Channel Analysis
Before blindly sinking a quarter of your company's profits in digital marketing, it is important to assess the utility and value that your marketing channels and tools bring.
Important questions to ask include:
- What is the primary marketing driver of prospects for your business? Is it your website, social media, automation platforms?
- What demographics does your content typically attract, what in your content attracts them, which channel are they from?
- Do your analytics platforms and customer database have the right user-friendly features to accurately target the right market/customer segments and drive awareness of your offerings?
Without assessing all these factors, you are effectively throwing away your hard earned revenue.
Optimizing Your Channels & Customer’s Journey
What most people do not understand about marketing is that even the best content will not change the purchasing behavior of a prospect if there is no need or want of that product or service. Only once your systems are integrated and channels are thoroughly analyzed will you be able to develop a successful strategy.
By integrating your systems and creating a better overall picture of your marketing funnel, opportunities for growth can be easily identified, resulting in more relevant and personalized experiences. Thorough analysis of your marketing channels will allow you to get the most out of your marketing spend through deploying your resources that best suits your customers. Whether that be through emails, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), all these tactics come back to one key idea: turning your data into a competitive advantage that drives new revenue.
Digital Transformation & Beyond
Jeanne W. Ross of MIT Sloan’s Center for Information Systems Research said, “Clearly, the thing that’s transforming is not the technology — the technology is transforming you.” As mentioned in “What's The Deal With Digital Transformation?,” true digital transformation is a practice of never ending experimentation that drives continuous growth and efficiency across the organization. As your organization improves the systems and processes used to store, manage, and analyze, the data you collect will mature. This leads to new insights that generate efficiencies, improvements, and opportunities as a natural product of your digitally transformed business operating model.
For marketing, this digital enablement equates to higher rates of returns for your marketing spend, lower costs per gained prospect for targeted digital ads via real time bidding, higher and faster conversion rates of prospects to customers by optimizing your customer journey, and an overall better customer experience resulting in higher retention rates.
