The Role Of Marketing in Digital Transformation
We live in a digital world where technology is becoming an increasingly important aspect of business, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the lockdowns, restrictions, and uncertainty, thousands of business leaders embraced digital transformation to ensure continuity and stay competitive. Although IT experienced the most upgrades in terms of changes, another department that saw major transitions was marketing.
Thus, understanding the role of marketing in digital transformation has become one of the key prerequisites of success as companies look to introduce and embrace new channels, technologies, and practices into their marketing mix.
Understanding Marketing Transformation
Digital transformation in marketing or “marketing transformation” involves adopting innovative marketing solutions, technologies, and practices to establish two-way communication with customers and foster a seamless buying experience by understanding their needs. Simply put, the digitalization of marketing is about leveraging data to help create customer-centric marketing strategies and campaigns.
Most modern business leaders know that having a great product or service isn’t the holy grail anymore. To succeed in the new normal, you need a solid strategy to improve your brand and product awareness. More importantly, you need powerful tools and platforms to fuel your sales funnel and engage with customers at every point to build long-term relationships.
In the age of digital disruption, marketing has transformed from billboard ads, magazines, radio, and direct mail to PPC, SEO, email marketing, and videos, among so many other forms of digital content. Some saw these changes as a threat while others saw them as a game-changer to open new opportunities for growth and expansion.
The good news is that this evolutionary shift isn’t over. The digital world continues to evolve with new tools and channels coming into the mix every year. Therefore, your marketing department needs to be ready to break down the silos of marketing transformation and understand that it’s not just about embracing technology.
It’s also about upskilling and training your marketing team to adapt their mindsets and capabilities according to the market developments and growing organizational needs.
So, What’s Changed?
The evolution of marketing in the digital transformation age is bringing about an unparalleled amount of change in this important organizational department. Here’s a look at some of the most impactful transitions:
1. From Promotion to Relationship Building
Perhaps the biggest transition in marketing transformation is that marketing campaigns have evolved from show-and-tell to relationship building. In the digital age, you can’t rely solely on billboards, Facebook ads, and commercials, and call it a day. Modern consumers expect businesses to take ownership of their products and not just move on from campaign to campaign.
They want to interact with companies, learn about the entire product lifecycle, ask questions and provide feedback on different channels. Therefore, marketing teams need to create an environment that facilitates all these needs and more by adopting the right platforms and technologies.
Today, marketing is all about maximizing customer experience by building strategic relationships from the first touchpoint to after-sales.
2. From Instinct and Gut Feeling to Data
For decades, great marketers have relied on their gut feeling and instinct to make decisions. Some of these decisions have worked out, while others haven’t. The good news is that marketers can now leverage the power of data to avoid taking the traditional route and collect valuable information to generate actionable insights.
These insights can then be plugged into the customer journey flow via personalized messaging and offers. From social media marketing tools to email marketing tools, lead enrichment tools, data analytics tools, conversational optimization tools, etc., the data solutions are practically endless.
3. From Legwork to Automation
Following the emergence of smartphones and other technologies, consumer attention span has dropped drastically in the last two decades. The digital age is also the age of instant gratification. Simply put, modern customers are far more impatient than their traditional counterparts. They want their products in real-time and also want to be acknowledged in real-time.
However, no matter how fast marketers operate, they’re still human, so they can’t operate round-the-clock. That’s where automation comes in. With technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, marketers can now switch product messaging in real-time to ensure 24/7 business availability. They can fill the gap where human marketers simply cannot function.
In other words, digital transformation can compound customers’ impatience. Moreover, marketers can scale their company’s innovation to drive their products or services to market successfully faster and more cost-effectively.
4. From Sales People to Solution Providers
In marketing transformation, modern teams are more than salespeople looking to quickly empty their shelves and move on to the next batch. Instead, they’re creative, innovative, and curious professionals with a host of hard and soft skills which they can use to understand and utilize data. They’re people always looking to get to know their target audience and look forward to improving every phase of the customer journey.
Moreover, they’re people looking to play an active role in fostering and maintaining a unique organizational culture and help inspire employees working in every department to serve as brand ambassadors of their products and services.
Instead of crunching numbers and selling features, they think outside the box to provide solutions to solve different customers’ pain points. This transformation is key to improving customer retention and lowering the customer acquisition cost.
Bottom Line
Marketing transformation is one of the most trending practices in the business world following the events of the pandemic. With thousands of companies looking to maximize awareness, engagement, sales, and revenue with digital solutions and technologies, you cannot afford to be a digital dinosaur as resistance to change can be futile.
By understanding the role of digital transformation in your organization, you can leverage the power of innovative solutions to build a solid marketing infrastructure that allows you to react to the changing market dynamics.
