Digital transformation is the buzzword of today. However, it means different things to different people. If you put it simply, it is the pursuit of achieving the highest level of scale, efficiency, innovation, and profit using data and technology.
When it comes to strategy and operations, there are three keys to effective digital marketing transformation.
- Organization
Change is a tough aspect to deal with. While implementing, it can seem inefficient. Digital transformations are capable of altering company culture, including long-standing strategies, processes and tools.
Organizational challenges are often considered as toughest hurdles. Adopting necessary technology or data is the easiest way to achieve it. You can only do such things if everyone is ready to commit to a shared vision.
For instance, if you’re a part of a global organization and managing its marketing channel separately by region then there are multiple changes you can make, shifting team structure to drive greater scale and efficiency. It’s harnessing a mindset of thinking globally and executing locally.
Think global – It means creating a global framework on which all team members depend on technical resources, knowledge-sharing, direction, and collaboration.
Execute local- it means putting trust in the regional teams to put in marketing strategy according to unique and measured requirements of the local markets.
Digital transformation is about finding the right balance between standardization and execution on a local scale.
- Channel Management
Undertaking a digital transformation to rethink channel management strategy is an important step for any marketing team. Lack of cross-channel optimization can reduce the marketing return on investment (RoI).
Today, applying the rules of traditional marketing in digital marketing could be flawed or misleading. In the case of social or content marketing, the outcomes can be visible. These activities are considered as ‘top funnel tactics’.
If you properly manage your digital channels then you’ll get results. When analyzing your sales performance if you look at last-touch attribution, you arrive at a point that the best converting channels are paid search and display retargeting. These two do well in converting new customers but stay in the bottom funnel- the stage of the customer journey when people give information that they want to buy something. However, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social are fall into the top funnel channel.
The goal of a marketing organization is to grow and manage its audience effectively.
- Technology
Using a data management platform (DMP) you can build and define your audience through every customer touch point. DMP can store several pieces of information about customers interacted with over time.
For example, imagine you have a company that sells airline tickets, and your SEO team builds a landing page of the 5 most beautiful places in the USA. The page doesn’t say about the cost of an airline to the US. However, the page is intended for those travelers to want to visit the US.
A visitor finds the page via Google search and clicks your article. The visitor reads more articles leaves the page and doesn’t return for a while. On the contrary, you mark them using Facebook tracking pixels. All this information gets stored in DMP.
Later, you start a Facebook retargeting campaign which promotes a special, low-cost travel special to the US. You configure your campaigns to serve ads to cater for people who viewed pages on your website related to US content.
The visitor in the example never sees the ad. Reasons? A few days before the ad campaign, the visitor returned to the website and purchased a ticket to Berlin. Their information was saved in your CRM which sends data to DMP, and had to set up a rule to avoid serving Facebook ads to customers who had bought airline tickets in the last 2 months.
Now who takes the credit for the purchase of an air ticket to Berlin? Which media channels deserve credit for saving the organization the unspent media amount that could have been wasted on this traveller if someone had served the ad? This is a tricky question.
This is an example of marketing success that can be achieved using all digital channels working together.
Digital marketing transformation is a never-ending process. If you correctly execute these three factors then you can transform your team members to pioneer change. Your internal process also becomes streamlined which changes your organization and helps to achieve a distinct advantage over your competitors.