Recent global events have made one thing clear: digital transformation means survival. Businesses that can run remotely, in the cloud, online, and 100% digital can endure when a major global event forces businesses to close shop and keeps buyers at home. The means to market, sell, and service customers without needing a physical location exist across many industries, but this is especially true for the B2B world. Most of our business relationships and transactions can be conducted without the need to physically interact. Beyond enabling us to continue to operate in the face of disaster, digital transformation turns our companies into cost-effective, agile, and highly-efficient organizations. Expanding our capabilities to become more digital, more mobile, and driven by user-experience yields high levels of efficiency and satisfaction from clients, partners, and employees.
As a cloud-run business ourselves, we believe in digital transformation as a philosophy and lifestyle. As a marketing agency, our area is marketing transformation, which we’ll be talking a lot about in the next few weeks.
What is this marketing transformation your speak of?
CIOPages provides a very clear definition we couldn’t write better ourselves:
“Marketing Transformation is a strategic, structural, and systemic change encompassing the re-envisioning of the marketing operating model, restructuring the marketing organization, re-engineering of the core marketing processes, enabling new marketing capabilities, and very often re-platforming of the marketing software systems.“
Of course, we’ll unpack that a bit for you. It means firstly, that marketing transformation isn’t just a few quick changes and upgrades to your CRM, but rather a change in approach, vision, and technology, as well as a cultural adoption of these changes. It also means that marketing in the experience economy requires organizations to focus on delivering positive experiences as much as they focus on the quality of their products and services. Finally, it means that businesses need to acknowledge the critical importance of a marketing organization when it comes to enabling responsiveness to quick and drastic changes in the broader ecosystem. Like we said in the beginning: transformation is survival.
How we tackle marketing transformation
There are many different models for marketing transformation out there, but we firmly believe in ours. Beyond our client testimonials, our personal experience as a business following our own framework and philosophy in marketing transformation, lets us testify and vouch for it as well. We call the RACE Framework. The acronym stands for Reach, Act, Convert and Engage. Each part represents a step in a company’s digital journey:
Reach: Digital media channel effectiveness
During this step, we help your company improve core digital marketing techniques to drive visits towards its digital properties. This includes fresh and relevant content, compelling digital properties such as a corporate website, landing pages, and paid/organic demand generation (SEO and P.P.C.).
Act: Customer journey analysis
Here we identify “quick wins” to improve interactions and conversion through a website; based on where visitors are arriving, common footfall, and C.T.A. improvements. We help clients enable a modern mobile-responsive website with fine-tuned navigation for content consumption and lead management.
Convert: Conversion rate optimization
We help identify and implement improvements to increase lead conversion using powerful Business Intelligence tools, sales funnel configurations and CRM procedures.
Engage: Customer Digital Experience
Delivering positive and satisfying customer-experiences is key in a successful marketing transformation. We help organizations review and improve drivers and levers for effective customer engagement and loyalty across all digital marketing properties and throughout the customer’s entire purchasing journey.
These four steps serve as the basis for our digital marketing approach and the strategies we build. This framework drives the services we provide and how we deliver them. It helps us understand our customers’ challenges in-depth and helps us provide digital marketing strategies tailored to meet their specific needs. We’re not trying to sell anything to you (not yet, anyway), we just want to show you the complexity behind marketing transformation and why a structured and methodical approach is necessary to successfully carry out that transformation. This complexity is why many organizations need help from experts in order to get things moving.
Taking steps in the right direction
If your a business leader or marketing manager reading this, the odds are that you’ve experienced quite a few unexpected challenges in 2020. We can empathize: we’re working ardently to keep our business successful in the face of adversity. Drastic and unexpected changes in the playing field drive the need for adaptation. New opportunities arise from any situation and those who learn how to adapt are the ones who not only survive, but thrive when the going gets tough.
If there’s ever been a time to consider marketing transformation, it’s now more than ever. Stay tuned to our blog and our social media channels for a series of tips, guides, and thought leadership on marketing transformation and how you can turn your business’ modern challenges into innovative opportunities to evolve.
