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A Complete Guide To Driving Digital Transformation In Marketing

A guide to driving digital transformation in marketing blog post by datapine

Digital transformation is a broad term that is difficult to define precisely. Think of digital transformation as a way to future-proof a business. But, you can consider it a change in the business activities to prioritize your business's digital presence. Various industries and departments use this phrase in different ways.

For instance, when it comes to Human Resources, a digital transformation entails streamlining operations and digitizing personnel data. An accounting department may consider leveraging electronic contracts, data collecting, and reporting as a part of the digital transition.

Here, you can take a quick look at how the world is going digital, meaning, a high scope for your business if you are looking for a digital transformation.

Overview of digital transformation around the world on 2020

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Digital transformation of your business is possible when you can use emerging automation, Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in your marketing.

However, when it comes to digital transformation in marketing, there is a larger revolution in how marketers use modern tools and technologies. The key to leading a successful digital transformation in marketing involves using and maximizing the capabilities of a business's digital presence. In other words, it means employing technology to constantly improve the whole company model, including its offerings, customer service, and operations.

Approach To Digital Marketing

Your key marketing leaders should be tasked with helping organizations achieve significant growth so that they may generate considerable value now and in the future.

One way to leverage digital marketing involves defining KPIs for marketing automation. These generally include:

  • lead conversion rates, 
  • click-through rates for ad campaigns, 
  • number of emails opened by recipients,
  • completing a specific goal (downloads, calls, clicks, etc.)

Generating intended outcomes will require a marketing professional with a knack to automate key activities. First, they need to pick up the right tools that allow marketing teams to assess the organization’s progress and better understand the behavior of its clients.

Some of the key marketing automation tools include:

Moreover, your marketing automation experts can leverage these tools to identify and monitor digital marketing actions relevant to ongoing campaigns.

Steps To Driving A Successful Digital Transformation

Once you know why digital transformation is necessary for business growth, a successful digital marketing team can help a business evolve with the right strategy. They can deliver the right message at the right time to the right person in the right location with adequate. Such an approach will require blending in data with digital technology so that your customers get more value from your services, advertising, and offers. That said, now we will look at some key steps you need to follow in order to ensure a successful marketing digital transformation.

1. The Basic Scope Of Automation In Digital Marketing

Marketing automation may automate some of the most time-consuming procedures associated with marketing operations, such as sending out emails. Other tasks include:

  • Track and report digital marketing campaigns: Your automation KPIs should involve monitoring and reporting on campaign activity as your team leverages various channels to reach the target audience. Several marketing dashboard tools allow you to generate automated online dashboards and reports to track your most relevant KPIs in one place.
  • Converting leads: This involves automating the process of generating and converting leads is a lengthy one, but it may be automated quickly. For instance, you can trigger emails to soft leads after they've downloaded anything from your site. Such emails may include specialized information or content tailored to convert those leads into customers. 
  • Social Media: You may use various social networking platforms to post photos, write text, and target certain websites. Tools like HootSuite can help automate posting on various postings at a predefined time.  
  • Email newsletters: Create and distribute email newsletters automatically to save time.

2. Create A Marketing Funnel

You can include digital marketing in the idea of a conventional marketing funnel that gauges an impact on how prospective consumers respond, eventually leading to a commitment to buy.

The marketing funnel was before the arrival of digital technology which included the following phases:

  • Awareness: Here, your prospective customers initially become aware that you provide a product or service they may be interested in.
  • Interest: Next, you will have a set of customers interested in learning more about your business and whether it can meet their demands.
  • Consideration: This is where you have a set of probable buyers giving it some thought to buying your products and services. Here, they are showing more interest than just generating curiosity.
  • Intent: When individuals begin to develop toward a conclusion in favor of a product because they believe they need the product or service.
  • Decision: The final stage is where the customer chooses to do business with you.

Bring digital transformation to your marketing department and redefine the acquisition process backed by data. Your digital marketing KPIs can help marketers with additional essential multi-stage interaction and analytics tools. When you have set KPIs and got the right digital marketing tools at your disposal, your business will benefit from the following:

3. Refine Digital Channels

Your digital marketing team can determine how much the existing marketing tools and platforms are worth. This includes considering the website, automation tools, social media, customer database, and analytics platforms in more detail. 

Later, your team can find the right channels that offer better ROI. Also, they may consider whether these channels help pull the data that help decision-making? A thorough examination of the channels and available resources can ensure that you're well prepared for any change when running a successful business. 

4. Breaking Silos

A comprehensive digital marketing plan ensures that all your marketing channels communicate with one another and operate in tandem. It is not a good idea to log in and out of ten different accounts to track your customers' journey.

With an integrated marketing approach, your team can break down data silos by consolidating data management processes as a part of your digital transformation. This way, your team can operate more efficiently and collaboratively. The goal is to have clear information about your audience, their behaviors, and probable next steps. In order to do so, you can benefit from an interactive online marketing report that provides a centralized view to support relevant decisions and keep teams connected.

5. Interactivity-driven Social Marketing

Your prospective customers may connect with your company accounts on social media and ask questions that help them with the decision. They may use those platforms to make comments or feedback on the content they have just interacted with. Sometimes, they may simply like the post you share or even post it on their profile sharing. Such instances will need you to empower your business with social marketing tools like BuzzSumo for social engagement, Keyhole for #hashtag analysis, etc.

Major Digital Marketing Areas

While you go ‘all digital,’ there are a few aspects that you need to consider for 360-degree growth. You need to leverage a mix of digital media methods that blend in a range of specific solutions aimed at different marketing verticals. Comprehensive digital marketing will have your team addressing the following areas as a part of the transformation plan.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click advertising is another prominent digital marketing method. Often, you will leverage search engines (Google), social media platforms(Facebook, Instagram, etc.), or video streaming sites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) to display your ads. 

Paid advertising budget allocation overview

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This is an advertising model where you pay per click, meaning every visit to your website from those links will cost you a certain amount. This is one of the popular ways to drive traffic to a company's website, as you have a lot of visibility on platforms where you place an ad.

2. SEO

Your transformation into digital space is incomplete without SEO, as it is a great technique to increase your website’s visibility and drive quality leads. In simple words, SEO is a technique to put your site on top of search engine results for certain terms (called queries). When someone searches for content related to your company or product, you want to be amongst the top to gain traction. And this will need your SEO team to take some actions using relevant tools.

  • Keyword research: Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Ads, etc to identify the right set of keywords to rank better.
  • Web traffic analysis: You can rely on Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel, etc.
  • Link Building: Use any of these top SEO tools to identify where your competitors generate backlinks and target those websites to build links that pass link juice to your website. Activities include guest posting, forum commenting, account creation, etc.

3. Social Media Marketing

Using social media to promote your content and brand can significantly impact your bottom line. Your overall marketing mix may benefit with the help of social media since most individuals have accounts on at least one of these sites. This can be seen with the increase in social media ad spending, which is expected to exponentially grow in the next years, as seen in the image below.

Ad spending social media overview over the years

**Source (click to enlarge)**

You can opt to create social media corporate accounts that can help generate leads, increase traffic to the website, and enhance your brand awareness while being an effective free marketing tool. Here are some of the social media sites you should use as a part of social media marketing.

  • Pinterest
  • Snapchat
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Additionally, to track the success and performance of all your social efforts you can benefit from an interactive social media report. These reports offer a centralized view of all your SMM marketing activities and allow you to find improvement opportunities on the go. The image above is an example of a scorecard report tracking the performance of 4 social channels. The value of this tool lies in its visual nature. The colors red and green can tell you at a glance if your KPIs are performing as expected or if something needs to be changed.

Social media scorecard tracking relevant performance metrics for 4 social channels

**click to enlarge**

Bottomline

A wide range of business operations and marketing activities are affected by digital transformation. First, your marketers need to grasp the audience, learn from digital pioneers in other industries, and then equip your business with the right data.

Maintaining and increasing the ROI of your digital marketing requires constant improvement and iteration. The ever-changing digital landscape puts you at the risk of falling behind if you stop after just one or a few activities. Keeping your business at the forefront of digital growth for years to come requires you to be on top of the current marketing trends and be willing to try new things continuously. One way to do so includes driving marketing BI in your organization. These solutions will allow everyone to adopt a digital approach to their decision-making process in an easy and intuitive way.


Author Bio: 

Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.