Hierarchy Of Digital Needs In The Digital Era
Following a few basic pointers helps plan and optimize your digital spend and maximize your ROI
In today’s world, to stay ahead of the competition businesses are doing a platitude of things: getting on the cloud, a user friendly website, mobile website, mobile apps and so on. While there are new age companies and start-ups mushrooming, the old-timers are struggling to keep-up and adopt the new technologies.
What approach should legacy organizations adopt? Should the approach be same for both legacy companies and the new age start-ups? How can organizations prioritize their digital and technological spends?
If businesses follow few basic pointers, it will help them plan and optimize their digital spend and maximize their Return on Investment (ROI) to achieve digital transformation.
Step 1: Get Digital Presence, Announce Your Existence
First step for any business is to announce their existence in the digital space. To achieve this, they need to develop their website. Mobile as a medium cannot be ignored, hence organizations also need to develop a mobile site or a Responsive Web Design (RWD) site for themselves. Presence on social media is another basic requirement in today’s digital era.
Step 2: Plan And Prioritize Spends
Next step is to align the organizational goals to business goals. The approach for the entire digital change management depends on what the organization wants to achieve as a whole. The objectives can range from: increasing brand awareness, generating new leads, increasing sales & revenue and the likes. After the objective is identified, organizations should identify the channels to achieve these objectives.
For instance:
a) If the objective is to increase brand awareness, then they need to focus on Content Marketing, increasing presence on channels like Social Media which have wider reach at minimal cost and investment
b) If the objective is to generate leads and increase sales & revenue, then they need to focus on paid marketing like Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Remarketing, Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Mobile marketing
Step 3: Track And Monitor The Results
Organizations, big or small, old or new should constantly measure the results and improvise. With plethora of tools available at reasonable cost a portion of organization’s digital budget should be allocated to analytics. Analytics helps to improvise the marketing plan and campaign calendar, optimize the marketing spends and maximize the ROI.
To manage relationships with current and future customers one need to use technology to organize and automate customer interactions, synchronize sales, marketing & customer services; Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) along with analytics will help organizations achieve this and much more.
Step 4: Implement Customization And Personalization
Today the customer is bombarded with advertisements at every walk of life. So it is important that the emails & display ads break the clutter. It is important that organizations strive to deliver more customized and personalized messages to the customers. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is via Web Content Management Systems (CMS) through Mobile Apps.
Step 5: Innovate And Challenge The Existing
Digital evolution is a continuous process. SEO algorithms keep evolving, new techniques in SEM come to light and Descriptive Analytics give way to Predictive Analytics.
Organizations which need to beat the competition should innovate, invest in new ideas and challenge the existing, constantly. Innovation in every sphere, be it email-marketing, mobile app notification or display ads, will play a big role in making digital transformation real.
Find out more on the future of Business at our DLUK - Trends Briefing on the 24th September 2015