While we believe most companies benefit from moving their product catalog and service offerings online, a digital transformation is much more than simply a better website or an online store. Here are five ideas for digital transformation beyond eCommerce that can be considered for almost any company.
Customer Data and Lead Management
For those in the sales space — the day of the rolodex is long, long behind us. In the digital era, finding new leads and maintaining customers is done in exceptionally different ways. Many companies have already implemented Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. We believe managing the interactions between your customers and future leads depends more on how effectively you use the data in your CRM than the technology vendor or tool itself. How are you turning the information about your customers in your CRM tools into actionable insights that build loyalty, increase frequency of purchases, and grow order sizes? Have you used your customer data to create an Ideal Customer Profile based on your most profitable customers? And targeted the look-alikes to your Ideal Customer? Are you gathering relevant external data to improve your CRM and improve customer targeting and loyalty?
Content Creation
Online research is the pillar of decision making in the modern era. In the eyes of the internet, if you aren’t hosting a generous amount of information on your website you aren’t building credibility in your field and keeping loyal customers informed. Information takes many shapes — content marketing, product data, service summaries, white papers, etc. We believe making sure your information is readily digestible is imperative. Your content must be valuable, relevant and understood both by the readers coming to your site and Google’s web crawlers. Growing organic traffic requires both technical SEO expertise and a strategic content approach based on keyword volumes/competitiveness and your company’s relevance for the topics.
Network of Things
A digital transformation can start with something as “simple” as adding a tracking infrastructure to critical metrics or assets across your supply chain. Incorporating an Internet of Things infrastructure can revolutionize operations, process efficiency, and significantly improve resource management. While embracing an IoT infrastructure is no small task, it allows for the collection of critically valuable data that can guide a revolution throughout a company
Digital Advertising
Every long-standing company we see is underinvesting in digital advertising when compared to traditional marketing methods like trade shows, printed brochureware, print ads, radio and TV. We’re not saying these marketing tactics are worthless, but as eyeballs move online and ears move to podcasts, most traditional marketing teams are slow to shift spend toward digital marketing. On the internet, targeting your ideal audience is much more efficient with digital marketing and data-driven analysis for allocating spend.
Analytics and Data
The digital ideas we have discussed so far all have the opportunity to supply droves of data to your team. Yet, without the proper understanding and action from that data, it can be rendered overwhelming and costly. Focusing a data analytics effort on key performance indicators and critical operations is the key to making data valuable. Whether you’re meticulously tracking your supply chain, monitoring buying behavior on your store, understanding where your internet traffic is coming from, or harvesting external data to add into your CRM – understanding it with business acumen and then using it to guide value-added action is imperative.
Just get started – The digital transformation of a company should be more accurately described as a “digital evolution”. The core of the company does not change — the people, principles, business goals — nor do the changes happen overnight. Rather, the day-to-day means of doing business are shaped into a more efficient and streamlined version of their previous state. It’s not important that you get everything right immediately, but it’s critical that you pick a project and get going. Can we help you get your digital evolution ignited? Please let us know at sales@nimblegravity.com