Digital Transformation: What it is and 5 Ways Your Business Can Adapt
Want to challenge the status quo and build a more competitive business? See 5 business digital transformation tips here.
Digital transformation has changed the way we do business. Once perceived as a long-term goal set to roll out gradually in the next decade, has been fast-tracked largely due to the pandemic.
The key growth drivers of digital transformation in business are optimising the customer experience, operational flexibility, and innovation. As business digital transformation grows, the competition online becomes stiffer, pushing retailers to seek out technologies to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Today, we look into the benefits in store for your business and the strategies that are set to define the digital age.
What is Digital Transformation?
As the world morphs into a single digital village, businesses are scrambling to adapt to the changes or risk getting left behind.
Digital transformation is the process of integrating technology into aspects of your business. It doesn’t seek to remove traditional business methods, but rather helps businesses uncover new means for revenue growth.
Exploring the Digital Advantage
Digital transformation isn’t just about migrating to the cloud, it’s about leveraging technology that evaluates and optimizes existing processes to drive a business forward
1. Improved Data Collection
Businesses have various means of collecting data online —whether it’s through website forms, surveys, or marketing analytics. The data can then be used to derive insights that drive leads from one stage of the customer journey to the next.
2. Modernised Business Models
Marketing in the digital age is all about modernizing to boost market share and profit. Amid lockdown restrictions brought by the pandemic, the businesses that thrived were the ones that have gone digital.
A good example here is streaming services like Netflix. With cinemas closing their doors and video rentals becoming long obsolete, Netflix provided a channel for users to consume movies.
So it goes without saying that modernizing is key to building a resilient business — especially when faced with an economic or health crisis. On top of that, digital platforms remove the limitations of physical assets, allowing customers to engage with your business 24/7.
3. There’s Productivity in the Cloud
Now, we’ve established that digital transformation in business isn’t just about modifying the customer experience, it also bears a positive impact on operations.
By providing employees with the right tools, digital transformation can foster productivity and agility.
Cloud collaboration platforms can help you achieve this. Cloud storage, for example, allows employees to collaborate on files while on varying working hours.
Cloud collaboration merges communication too, allowing teams to access emails, instant messages, and video calls in one place. While software tools, like GitHub and BitBucket, let developers within an enterprise collaborate on projects.
5 Effective Strategies to Grow Your Business Online
Businesses often make the mistake of “going where the tide takes them”, only to discover that new strategies aren’t sustainable in the long run.
The same rings true when digitizing. You need to understand why you’re adopting digital models, how you plan to leverage this to engage with customers, and what areas you need to focus on.
Determine Why You’re Adopting a Digital Model
1. Assess Your Organization’s Goals
Set your digital transformation strategy up for success by identifying your organization’s long and short-term goals.
For example, your business could be looking into building a website. Before kickstarting your plan, determine what you’re looking to derive from this website and how it fits into the business roadmap.
Is it to build brand awareness? Or is it to gain new leads for your sales team? Or maybe you’re looking for your website to become a primary income-generating channel?
By creating compelling business cases, you get to highlight the ROI (Return on Investment) you’re looking to derive from this project. You also determine how it aligns with your business goals, and how it overweighs the cost to invest in this digital platform.
How to Leverage Digital Transformation in Business Operations
2. Explore New Channels
Websites are a must-have tool for every business. Aside from being a means for customers to purchase something from you, websites are ideal for launching content marketing campaigns.
With the help of blogs, videos, and other lead-generating copies, you produce valuable content that addresses customer pain points. In turn, this helps you establish brand authority and new sales opportunities for your business.
To support your website, diversify your online presence by implementing email marketing and social media strategies. Both avenues are a great way to establish a direct line with your customers.
3. Leverage Data to Get Quality Business Insights
We mentioned how digital transformation in business has made it easier for businesses to collect data. By thoughtfully analysing this data, your business can gain insights into your customer’s needs.
Let’s say you’re running an ecommerce site. You might want to set up a (analytics) tool like Google Analytics to track your website performance. The good news is that there’s no need to painstakingly go through thousands of data, you can always filter reports you want to zoom in on.
Here are tips to implement based on the insights you gathered:
- Analyse your best-performing content. Content marketing is an effective strategy for building organic traffic and establishing trust in your industry or niche. However, identifying the best content for your audience can be tricky.
- Leveraging analytics lets you identify pages that get the most traffic and conversions. This gives you an idea of what type of content gains the most traction with your audience.
- Identify trends and new markets. If there’s one thing successful companies have in common, it’s that they’re always looking to experiment.
- Tools like Google Analytics help you identify new trends and markets to look out for. For example, you can check the performance of your marketing campaign over time.
Another advantage of Analytics tools is that you discover potential markets for your business. If you’re looking to expand globally, you can view the number of visitors and conversions by filtering results by country. This helps you decide the regions worth investing in.
Optimize pages that attract the most traffic. Different pages can be optimized for specific keywords, allowing them to rank higher on search engines. But it doesn’t stop there — you can further optimize pages by personalizing your content and adding related products to test if it boosts engagement and conversions.
What are the Key Areas to Focus on?
4. Invest in Tools That Boost Your Value Proposition
Modern customers are always looking for convenience and gratification. Online, it’s about who can provide the best and fastest solutions to their inquiries or pain points. So it goes without saying that you need to invest in digital tools that meet consumer demands.
Take websites for example. Websites act as a one-stop shop for users, allowing them to learn more about your products, browse how-to articles, and even submit an inquiry.
But websites don’t function alone. They need to be backed by the right tools and strategies to be effective. For instance, you’ll need a reliable hosting provider to give end-users a quality website experience.
Web hosts play a vital role in company growth as well — as you’ll need a partner that effectively scales along with your business.
Also, companies should start looking into cloud-based platforms. The appeal of the cloud lies in its flexibility and cost savings. Rather than investing in hardware, software, and manpower, brands can scale only as needed and pay only for the resources they use.
5. Go Omnichannel
Omnichannel is a lead nurturing tactic where companies engage with consumers across different channels, platforms, and devices.
Instead of only driving leads through a website, for example, a brand would also engage with customers through their brick-and-mortar store, email, and online marketplaces.
The biggest advantage of omnichannel is accessibility. As soon as prospects are ready to buy, they can find your business on multiple platforms and sales channels.
This approach has proven to be effective for businesses with brick-and-mortar stores. A Think with Google report noted that businesses with an omnichannel strategy in place see an 80% higher rate of incremental store visits.
Go Digital or Go Home
Competitive businesses are willing to step out of their comfort zones to experience true growth.
Digital adoption will always come with its risks, so be sure to surround yourself with the right internal team and external partners. By doing so, you not only ensure that you’re making the right investments, but you drive your business towards improving your processes and results.