Learn how digital transformation has changed the marketing industry and what skills your marketing team needs to develop today to succeed tomorrow.
For marketers, digital transformation is one of the most important topics today. It’s not just about technology, but also about people and processes, as well as data, analytics and strategy.
Digital marketing not only changes the way your customers interact with your brand, it also changes the way you market.
In traditional marketing, and even after the advent of the Internet, companies create marketing content to attract a broad audience that may or may not consume the content online.
This trial-and-error marketing strategy no longer works. Today, the world’s most successful companies are creating stories powered by automation and data analytics as part of the digital transformation of marketing.
In this blog post, we look at how digital transformation has changed the marketing industry and why, as a marketer, you should care. We highlight what your team needs to do today to succeed tomorrow and what you need to know about the latest digital content trends.
But what exactly is digital transformation?
Digital transformation is the marketing industry’s response to the technological revolution. The industry has shifted from traditional marketing activities to digital models due to the constant evolution of technologies, markets and consumer behavior.
The goals of marketing have shifted from old-fashioned advertising and large-scale branding to targeted customer acquisition, customer retention and loyalty.
An industry email list is an excellent marketing tool that helps companies to connect with targeted audiences. Businesses may increase industry email list engagement and boost conversion rates by utilizing carefully chosen and divided connections. Updated lists guarantee precision and pertinence, augmenting the effect of campaigns. In the end, spending money on a high-quality email list improves client connections and spurs expansion in cutthroat industries.
What’s interesting about these new marketing goals is that they don’t focus on the technology itself, but rather on how technology enables the business models that matter most to your company’s success across traditional and digital channels.
In short, you want a more effective and efficient way to reach your current and future customers through digital marketing. And this is impossible without a holistic digital transformation strategy for your marketing department.
What is the relationship between digital transformation and marketing?
Large companies are no longer the only ones developing a digital transformation strategy to gain a competitive advantage. Today, even small businesses need digital marketing to survive.
Imagine yourself as a consumer. When was the last time you bought something from a brand – global or local – without first discovering it online? Hard to answer, isn’t it?
Gone are the days of going to the supermarket to buy a month’s worth of groceries. In the digital age, consumers first encounter brands – big and small – online, then research the ones they’re interested in, and only then decide to buy.
Think of a family business that started out thriving through traditional advertising or even good old word of mouth. If you buy something from that business, your customer journey will involve giving a review after the purchase and spreading the word.
But if that brand isn’t present on the social media platforms you use, how are you going to make it known? If it doesn’t have a live chat option or an instant survey that you can answer on the go from your smartphone, how are you going to give your opinion about the product/service to the business owner?
If you own such an establishment, imagine how many opportunities for growth and product improvement you will miss by sticking to traditional marketing activities alone. On the other hand, a successful digital marketing strategy will transform you from a business owner to a business leader who is always on top of customer needs and trends.
Before new technologies caused the digital upheaval we are all experiencing today, marketing activities were based mainly on advertising, which left little room for savings. That is why, today, no business strategy can succeed if it does not integrate digital marketing aimed at constantly improving the customer experience.
Key marketing goals your business can achieve through digital transformation.
Here are four marketing goals that digital transformation can help you achieve:
- Reduce churn and improve retention by building customer loyalty.
- Increase the performance of digital activities.
- Create digital experiences that give your business a competitive advantage.
- Expanding market opportunities through digital innovation.
To achieve these goals, marketers like you must focus on people, processes, and technology; therefore, you can no longer rely on traditional key performance indicators such as return on ad spend.
To retain customers, your business needs to engage with targeted audiences much more deeply than before digital transformation. This means you need to better understand who your audiences are and how to retain them.
For this, you can use CRM software with built-in data analytics. These tools help you find the best digital marketing strategies, content developers, and social media engagement managers, among others, to improve your brand’s digital interactions with existing and potential customers so they come back to you.
How to measure the ROI of digital marketing?
Most companies struggle to allocate budget to digital marketing because they don’t yet know how to measure the ROI of a new business model that incorporates a digital transformation strategy.
For example, if only 20% of your total marketing budget is spent on social media advertising, but social ads bring in 50% of all new customers, increasing your investment in social ads could yield significant returns.
Similarly, if investing in non-advertising digital marketing activities generates a small but steadily increasing return, increasing these activities can help reduce your advertising spend.
To create a digital experience, you need to understand how new digital technologies, such as mobile apps and social media, influence the customer qatar phone number list buy experience and what exactly your customers want.
Understanding where your customers go to look for information and how they are most likely to interact with your brand can help you create an overall enjoyable experience for them.
Successful marketing innovation brings together all of the above elements into new ways to reach prospects, offering them more value than was previously available. With the right digital marketing tools, your business can achieve this.
For example, if analytics suggest that your customers prefer to have their questions answered by a chatbot rather than by phone or email, you can easily increase your budget for chat tools, even if you don’t see a direct ROI.
In today’s digital age, measuring ROI on direct sales activities like cold calling alone may not get you very far. Every touchpoint that can help improve the customer experience is worth investing in. The image below highlights the marketing channels that deliver the best ROI for businesses like yours:
Everyone knows that big companies have the money to spend on advertising and quickly acquire more customers – Coca-Cola, for example, spends billions on advertising – but that’s not enough. Big companies also have a whole system in place to maintain long-term customer engagement.
Here is a quote from Jeff Bezos about his famous “obsession” with customer satisfaction:
“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy online, they might each tell 6,000.”
Therefore, as a business, it is useful to remember that you can quickly get a thousand customers by placing an ad on Google or Facebook, but you will lose those customers just as quickly if you do not have a digital marketing strategy focused on customer delight.
The key to success: people, processes and technology
People, processes and technology are the key to digital transformation and long-term digital marketing success. You can’t outsource digital transformation because it involves changing the way you think about your customers, as well as digital marketing workflows and resources, but you can get help.
By making these changes, you will be able to offer a more intimate digital experience to your customers.
To succeed in digital transformation, here is what you need:
- The right people on board – individuals who can think digitally and effectively execute digital transformation strategies.
- A process to become a digital business and transform the way you create content, measure performance, acquire customers and provide customer service.
- Digital marketing technology tools that cover the latest innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI),
- machine learning (ML), speech recognition, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
What does your team need to do today to be successful tomorrow?
Equip your digital marketing team with the skills, abilities, and tools needed for successful digital transformation. You want them to be digital-first in a complete list of unit phone numbers their thinking, digital-native in their execution, and digital-savvy in marketing technology.
- A digital-first mindset : Digital strategy is your team’s first response to new business objectives.
- A “digital native” execution : Your team creates digital content for all types of digital media; the content will be different depending on the platform used.
- Digital Marketing : Your team analyzes how different digital channels can work together to create a delightful customer experience.
Your teammates should also be adept at the new and mutating culture of memes, short films, reels, and anything else that can help them capitalize on digital marketing opportunities.
In short, here’s your marketing team’s mantra: Think digital, act digital, measure digital .
How to stay on top of digital trends?
To stay on top of the latest trends, you must always learn new skills and create new strategies. As a digital marketer, you must think like a consumer and be on the lookout for every innovation in the market that can improve the lives of customers.
Wondering what this means? Let me explain with an example.
Recently, a friend needed new glasses. A quick Google search led him to a brand that helped him select frames online by style, size, and more.
My friend was able to add his preferences but wasn’t too sure about the size. To solve the problem, the brand’s chatbot directed him to a landing page with facial recognition where he could virtually “try on” the glasses and choose the right size.
Then he was prompted to “upload” his prescription and select the type of glasses he wanted: bifocal or progressive, with or without UV protection or anti-reflective coating, etc. By the way, did I mention that my friend completed these steps on his smartphone in a matter of minutes? The glasses were delivered to his home a few days later.
What does this have to do with the digital transformation of marketing? In this case, the brand is using the latest digital tools to offer its customers a seamless online shopping experience, without even having to visit a physical store.
Here are some trends shaping the digital transformation of businesses:
- Generation Z consumers are digital natives.
- Content marketing is at the forefront of digital transformation.
- Video is the key enabler of digital transformation for marketing teams, and it requires digital marketers to master video storytelling skills.
- Every digital marketer needs to master new skills such as SEO, content marketing, social media advertising, digital PR, data analysis, and creative design.
The future of digital transformation for marketing includes:
- New global technologies such as AI and ML.
- Personalized on-site messages to help customers pick up where they left off.
- AI-powered chatbots to engage customers in the nitty-gritty of introducing the brand and its product line.
- Personalized email marketing for instant feedback on products and services.
- Instant messaging on social media platforms to keep customers informed about payment and delivery of products.
You see, digital transformation is happening right before our eyes (quite literally in the example above), and if you, as a marketer, don’t realize who moved your cheese, you’ll soon have nothing left to eat!
Let’s take a look at what digital transformation could look like in the 2030s:
- Virtual, augmented and mixed reality will become the new standard for digital marketing.
- The use of digital design elements such as infographics, well-edited images and engaging videos will continue to dominate.
- Information accessible through digital analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics, will remain the digital marketer’s primary tool.
- Digital marketers will need skills in data analysis, visual storytelling, and digital public relations. In addition to their current skills such as SEO. Content marketing, social media advertising, and graphic or creative design.
- Companies will compete based on how well they have implemented digital transformation for their marketing teams.
If these statistics seem overwhelming to you, we can understand that.
Here’s what you can do to adapt:
- Start learning digital marketing skills and strategies. Learn about digital trends, tools, techniques, and social media updates.
- Experiment with different software tools to improve your brand reach and customer experience.
- Learn digital design elements like infographics, digital photography, and short videos to tell stories about your brand.
- Experiment with data analysis tools to measure the progress of your marketing campaigns.
- Use multiple platforms to tell your brand story – don’t overlook new and emerging platforms like Quora, Medium, and Instagram.
- Invest in established and emerging digital technology tools that rely on AI, VR and AR.
Bottom line: Focus on digital transformation to delight your customers.
If you want to succeed as a digital marketer, digital transformation is the only way forward. Digital technologies like SEO and PPC advertising can help you find new audiences and increase your revenue.
Revenue was the buzzword in digital marketing until millennials became the driving force behind the global economy. Today, digital marketing is all about customer satisfaction. Once that goal is achieved and maintained, sales will naturally follow.
