The Chartered Institute of Marketing recently embarked on its own rebrand and all-new content marketing initiative. This month’s theme is digital transformation as it effects all businesses of all sizes and in all sectors. It got us thinking…
Digital transformation is about a root and branch, internal and external rethinking of customer service and customer experience taking the best digital technologies to deliver better products and services more efficiently and more effectively.
As a brand digital agency, we often find ourselves delivering marketing assets like websites that either need to be plugged into internal CRM or marketing automation programmes so businesses can better capture and use customer insight, or design for their future integration.
CRM, marketing automation and moving towards a single customer view all sound challenging (and expensive) but they are becoming the norm as businesses look to operate smart across a bewildering number of channels.
Customers, no less, are demanding better online experiences, fuelled by super computers they have in their hands all day long and recommends from their colleagues, friends and family.
You can write this off but Gartner and IDC report that by 2020, more than 7 billion people on at least 30 billion devices will have created 44 zettabytes of data (44 trillion gigabytes).
If you are a business owner, sales or marketing manager tasked with getting more from your marketing, here are five benefits to help you sell digital transformation internally:
1. Transparency and trust
You’ll be better positioned to sell on transparency and trust as a result of a realisation that you sell benefits and solutions to problems. Understanding that you have to do a good job every time because it will solicit the right kind of feedback – and because there is no other way – inevitably creates an organisation built on service and trust.
2. Better experiences
Digital transformation as we defined above is part mindset / part technology – the application to customer service is the critical reason for embracing it. You’ll be more in tune with your customers and deliver better experiences, because you have taken the time to understand their problems and learned how you can help them, designing customer journeys that get them what they want or need faster.
3. More agile
Thinking digitally means never standing still. Once you embark on truly customer service focused marketing using digital technologies, you can’t reverse the train. You are now innovative. You will have created an innovation culture as you already think and approach things in different and more agile ways.
4. Opportunities
The process of becoming more customer focused and digitally biased means you will inevitably be better placed to take advantage of opportunities in the market – whether that is through heightened social listening, onsite customer service to help customers transact, improved check-out experiences, or superior aftercare service – all delivered through digital technology.
5. Real time
You’ll be more dynamic and able to operate in real-time – which is the world your customers are inhabiting.
Think about how the principles Amazon lives and dies by can be applied to how you service your customers: If I can place an order on Amazon through my smartphone with one-click at 8pm and have it delivered before 1pm the next day, how can you delight your customers?
Digital transformation can lead to a significant investment in I.T, software, hardware and training, but it starts out with classic marketing principles:
- Who do we serve?
- What do they need?
- How can we deliver value?
Share your story below / or get in touch today if you want to talk about marketing led digital transformation in your business?
The post Five benefits digital transformation brings to your business appeared first on Clock Creative.