How To Bring Digital Transformation To Marketing

How To Bring Digital Transformation To Marketing

Every large-scale organization today has employees separated into different teams and scattered across the business (often across geographies). Many of those people are now working from home and more disconnected than ever.

If teams aren’t careful, fragmented information and disconnected processes can quickly hamper progress. According to an analysis by McKinsey, in an average workweek, employees spend 20% of their time “looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.” That’s why it’s important for members of the organization to come together with shared tools, knowledge and processes to achieve common goals.

Many organizations are turning to digital strategies to foster cross-department success in business growth and customer service — particularly now that physical sales and marketing events are off the table. While it’s true that digital transformation can have far-reaching implications across a company, marketing arguably has the most to gain. According to Frost & Sullivan’s 2019 “Top End User Priorities in Digital Transformation” report, which surveyed 1,636 IT decision makers, more than two-thirds of organizations believe sales and marketing departments will be most impacted by digital transformation.

What Will Marketing Gain From Digital Transformation?

For most organizations, the twin goals of digital transformation are increasing organizational efficiency and improving customer experience. In fact, these goals should be directly linked: increasing efficiency in order to improve customer experience.

While the implications of this notion are far-reaching for marketing, one key ramification is ensuring organizational cohesiveness, consistency and responsiveness. From marketing messages and materials to customer journey and touch points, each disparate business line or geography should speak with one voice and engage customers with a consistent experience.

The larger an organization, the more important this brand consistency, yet, the harder it becomes to maintain. Digitalization, thus, becomes a dual-edged sword for marketing: It can supercharge the ability of disparate teams and geographies to “roll their own” chaotic approach in tweaking digital assets, campaigns, customer engagement, etc. Versioning challenges, inconsistent approval processes, local or individual preferences, and different (and often incompatible) systems and software can all contribute to the mayhem.

Conversely, digital can be a transformation for global marketing. Materials can be easily findable, rapidly propagated and consistently delivered, while customer experience can be cohesive across systems, offerings and geographies. Best practices and successful campaigns can be quickly identified, iterated and disseminated across teams. The overall result can be a dramatic improvement in organizational cohesion, agility and responsiveness.

Breaking Silos

One important roadblock to consider for any digital transformation is the existence of silos. Whether those are organizational, geographic or systemic, they will hinder the drive for consistency and efficiency. From a marketing perspective, those silos might be at the team or business level, driven by geography, or they might be a reflection of disparate systems and procedures.

The right approach to digital transformation can eliminate silos without the need to scrap everything and start from scratch. The answer lies in the use of automation to wrap and connect silos so that their existence no longer matters — not so much “breaking them” as making them disappear. For marketing, this might take the form of a unified content repository/dissemination, or automation that pulls and presents data insights from various tools, or process automation to route a customer journey through various systems.

In all cases the key consideration is that this automation eliminates the delays, errors and inconsistency that exists in manual approaches and disconnected silos.

Centering Excellence

Every transformation is a journey, and like any journey, it’s necessary to get and stay on track. For digital transformations, many organizations look to maintain bearings using what’s known as a center of excellence (CoE), which Gartner describes as “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.” For marketing transformation, this means centralizing and sharing best practices across teams and identifying potential opportunities for digital media and technology to better meet marketing goals.

In creating a CoE, it’s important to begin holistically with the business’ long-term goals. What is marketing trying to achieve, and how does it support the larger business plan? How does marketing collaborate with and support other parts of the organization? Outlining specific objectives and best practices will guide team members within the organization in sharing resources and streamlining processes.

Since we’re talking about digital transformation, the members of that CoE must embrace agility and innovation. This isn’t about the digital technology itself as much as the business transformation; it means identifying change, understanding risk and moving rapidly to adjust and improve.

With objectives and teams in place, it’s important to identify how to measure success. This means not only establishing the key performance indicators (KPIs) but also the metrics relevant to the CoE itself (resource utilization, best practice propagation, etc.), along with assigned responsibility for achieving each goal.

The CoE should encapsulate a library of go-to marketing materials to drive consistency and efficiency. These materials could be as simple as document templates (for case studies, e-books, etc.) to branding kits or process guides. Clear and centralized assets and processes lead to faster iteration, as members across the organization gain visibility into successful campaigns. Without this insight, teams might duplicate efforts or wander in directions that don’t match the overall business plan.

The CoE also plays a critical role in keeping the transformation on track and constantly adapting. This is one journey that’s never done, and an iterative methodology ensures relevance as the organization evolves. Done correctly, the CoE helps enforce consistency, currency and collaboration.

Automation And Excellence In Action

The combination of automation and a CoE can drive cohesive transformation, ensuring a company’s digital assets are available to everyone, ready for use as needed. This can allow marketing leads to proactively monitor what is being used inside and outside the organization, and understand where to concentrate for continuous improvement.

Most marketing departments are ripe for digital transformation. Done correctly, it can have an outsized impact on the organization as a whole.



Sudhanshu Kumar Of Digital Sukoon Shares 5 Tips To Start A Successful Digital Marketing Agency



What you think starting digital marketing agency is a simple task without any experience? Yes, it’s difficult however not impossible! What all it requires is to follow few steps that can help one in starting a successful digital marketing agency. In today’s fast-paced world of challenging business, it’s quite difficult to stay ahead of the competitors.

For this reason, its vital to stay updated with latest strategies. Might be you have read numerous blogs and books regarding how to start a digital marketing agency! But, still, if you didn’t find the correct information regarding the same then this guide is for you.

Sudhanshu Kumar who is the founder of a digital maketing agency called Digital Sukoon has shared some important tips for the beginners to start a successful digital marketing agency.

Before starting a digital agency, the foremost thing you need to do is to educate yourself as well as try to gain much knowledge. The reality is learning never stops! So, it’s better to invest your enough time as well as money in learning new things. In addition to this, it’s also important to have an understanding of industry too.

Few concepts that you should understand are PPC, email marketing campaigns, creating online funnels, SEO and so on. Also, you need to understand content marketing as well as graphic design since it will only help you in the long run.

The second most important step is to think about the niche since competition is intense and finding the niche will only help you in taking the agency to a higher level. Think whether you wish to emphasize one or 5-6 part of digital marketing! Do you wish to focus on a single industry or want to target more than that? Wish to emphasize your own area or national?

Every verdict will have their own consequences. In simple words, play with your strengths! Everything starts from this step only! So, start small and start strong!

While starting any digital marketing agency, its important to first gain trust from the clients. Then only you will be able to attract potential clients.

A good portfolio incorporates:
Detailed Case Studies
Snippets
Client Testimonials
Coming Goals for that Customer

Display to your target audience that in any circumstances you can easily deliver outcomes and will carry on always. Ensure the portfolio that you have created is ethical and authentic, not stretching the fact.

Choose few pertinent social media platforms in order to get connected with your potential clients later on. Sharing appropriate content as well as building connection with followers, no doubt, can help you in creating an online presence. Even, customers will start to build trust towards your brand. Simply, you can build enduring as well as valuable connections by connecting with the customer on numerous social media platforms.

Remember, it’s not vital to be available on every social media network, select the relevant ones completely based on your industry as well as niche and update them on a regular basis.
Stay Updated Stay Relevant

Do you know what’s the important thing for all digital marketing agencies? To keep themselves updated with up-to-date trends as well as methodologies! It's important to upgrade the skill set and remain relevant in order to deliver better services to the customers.

On the off chance, if you have workers, then ensure they attend training, conferences, seminars for developing new skills and for building relationships with like-minded people. The most imperative thing is to apprehend the dynamics of industry and remain updated with any latest actions in industry.

Wrap Up

Hope you have enjoyed reading this guide and it helped you in knowing more about the tips on how to start a digital marketing agency shared by him. While starting the agency, it’s better to begin small as well as focus on particular niche.

After building the proficiency in industry, you can start expanding slowly in order to move into more new industries. Taking action is the most vital thing to do while launching digital marketing agency.

Want to make your startup journey smooth? YS Education brings a comprehensive Funding Course, where you also get a chance to pitch your business plan to top investors. Click here to know more.