Digital transformation is not only about updating your website and your in-house apps, but it is a constantly evolving process. Digital transformation requires steady and continuous evaluation and updation in order to be a viable strategy for your organization. Your organization must be able to keep pace with the rapidly changing technology and the resulting challenges if it wants to traverse the journey of digital transformation. Studies have shown that those organizations which have embraced digitization have done extremely well economically, and those traditional large scale enterprises which have not digitized are in danger of closing down within a decade. Read on to find out all you need to know about digital transformation:
Is digital transformation a journey or a goal?
Nowadays, every organization has a digital presence even though its products and services require personal, face-to-face customer engagement. Mostly, digitization is understood as having a website but digital transformation is more fundamental than that. It’s a work in progress which is why it cannot be a goal which you can attain and then forget. It is a process – a platform to build and enhance your organization’s capabilities. You may even have to design and create digital services and products to change the method of interacting with customers. This may lead to forming partnerships beneficial for your organization. This can give a huge boost to your business in terms of profitability and exposure.
How do you start on the journey of digital transformation?
To digitize your company, you must have the support of the executive officers of your company. You have to get the approval for long term digital transformation. The journey of digital transformation has to facilitate close relationships between the company and its employees, and between a brand and its consumers. Both marketing and IT teams have to work closely and not as separate entities.
CMOs and CTOs have to work in tandem to make digitization a success, and ensure there is no fear or apprehension in the juniors regarding digitization.
Become customer focused
This is the age of experiential marketing where customers start expressing their feelings about a brand from the time of the first contact. Customers are quite market savvy and tend to conduct their own research digitally, before deciding on a brand, which makes it imperative that your brand must have digital avenues of engagement with potential customers. Studies have shown that more engagement led to more profits, thus emphasizing the importance of being customer focused.
Try out digital solutions hands on before deploying
Whenever you’re adding a new digital tool to your digital transformation strategy, ensure that your vendor allows you to test run it before deploying it. This will help you in deciding whether to utilize that particular solution or not, or else you might end up making a costly mistake. A new tool must be designed in such a way that it can connect with your marketing strategy architecture and business process.
Encourage companywide innovation
Innovative ideas can take your business to the next level, and these ideas can come from any department in the company. The days of relying solely on your marketing team to come up with creative solutions are gone – the trend is to welcome ideas from anyone in the company, which helps your employees in feeling “included”, and boosts their morale.
Tech trends you should watch out for
Cloud, AI, Big Data, and IoT are the trends you have to keep your eye on, if you really want to invest in digital transformation. Whether digital transformation is a journey or a goal for your organization, or both, once you embark on it, you have to adopt some of the trends or else your business might become obsolete. More and more companies are using Cloud application management and storage solutions as this gives their employees freedom to find solutions anytime, anywhere.
All you need to know about digital transformation is that it is a continuous process which you have to utilize to engage your current and future customers. It is about forging a strong bond between your organization, customers and employees. You must bring new digital tools to strengthen the bond even further.
