3 actions to kickstart Digital Transformation

Take a deep breath, you’ve managed to get the senior team to commit to a digital project and your digital transformation journey has started. The next stage requires a sprint! A big leap forward to catch up with or leapfrog the competitors. Here are three actions you can take now: 1. Benchmark against the competitors 2. Listen to your customers 3. Build a team

1. Benchmark your business against the competitors

Benchmarking will identify the biggest gaps and generate a priority action list. There are many tools available to enable you to benchmark your digital marketing capabilities as part of strategy development.

Strategic Benchmarking Tool

One of my favourites is this strategic benchmarking tool. It doesn’t require a lot of effort, so it’s painless, although the questions are thought-provoking. You could ask several team members to complete and then compare results. Simply select your answer from a drop down box…

Digital change management and getting buy-in for digital marketing transformation One of the key aspects of evolving a traditional company into a digital company is getting buy-in. One of the challenges is that digital simply isn’t understood. Some Chief Executives think digital is tactical, it refers to activities like sending out newsletters, improving Facebook page or online catalogue. As a result, digital is often delegated to the most junior person in the building who is perceived to have a great understanding of the business functionality of tools like Facebook. The exec team are missing the bigger picture. What’s worse is that less reputable agencies have constructed myths that it’s complicated and difficult and explain that only ‘masters of the art’ are able to access analytics, manage Instagram or increase Twitter followers. The path towards digital transformation is littered with disaster. There have been many Twitter…

A case study of how Ford have embraced digital and social media

The digital landscape for the majority of sectors has witnessed a meteoric rise in the number brands. These brands come in all sizes and shapes – On one side you have the traditional brands making the steady transition to the world of digital and on the other, the start-up brand, out there to cause disruption to the sector and to offer that something a little different. And they all have the same objective - vying for our attention.

In with the old

The transformation traditional organisations are learning to wrestle with is the fact that moving to a digital future, traditional brands should not still try to control media content that impacts the brand and its perception, rather the brand should instead focus on becoming more transparent and seek to build engagement, credibility and collaboration with its user base.

A case study of…

What’s New in Marketing? July 2014 roundup

How to achieve Digital Transformation in businesses has been a hot topic through 2014 and this month we have focused our advice on this. To help get focus and review current use of digital we created this roadmap so you can summarise where you are now and where you need to be in future. It’s taken from our new Digital Transformation guide for Expert members.

Strategy and planning

Our strategy and planning posts also focus on transformation: What is Digital Transformation? - Annmarie Hanlon introduces the concept and gives examples in this post. Digital to account for 75% of all marketing spend in 5 years - the need to manage transformation is shown in this post by Dan Bosomworth of new research from Accenture. Insourcing vs outsourcing for digital marketing - James Carson asks “Which digital marketing activities you should keep inhouse or…

Get in the game - don’t get stuck on the sideline

More than a third (35%) of senior marketing professionals believe that digital marketing will account for more than 50% of marketing spend by 2019, according to a new report from Accenture.  37% feel it’ll account for 75% or more of all budget. Accenture’s research is based on survey responses of nearly 600 executives in 11 countries conducted between November 2013 and January 2014. My immediate question when I saw this headline for the report is what is "digital investment"? Is this just online advertising rather than actual marketing? We have to guard from a lazy “TV 2.0” mindset towards digital where we move ad spend, literally online. Thankfully the report is more broadly focussed on using digital to orientate around a consumer - so all's good! What's behind the positivity about the future of digital? With the Accenture…

A Review of CTRL ALT Delete by Mitch Joel

As we work from day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month it’s easy to miss the extent of the changes that digital media and technology have made to our businesses and careers. I will be discussing how to manage these changes, both at a business level and a personal level in our upcoming webinar on July 10th with Mitch Joel, the author of CTRL ALT Delete and Six Pixels of Separation, who is President of Twist Image - one of the largest independent Digital Marketing agencies in North America, but sold to WPP earlier this year. It's a free webcast and if you register now you can watch live or playback. …

Alignment vs Impact: Why businesses must get a grip of digital

Managers of digital transformation initiatives should ask where does digital strategies ‘sit’ compared with more general business and marketing strategies - where does leadership of the digital agenda actual come from, and is that right?  A new report from Forrester, State of Digital Business 2014 , has revealed major disconnects between the marketing and technology sides of businesses. The survey responses from 1,591 senior business leaders in the UK and US during November 2013 to January 2014,  signals a “digital strategy execution crisis." In the report, 74% of executives report that their company has a digital strategy - yet a ‘digital strategy’ often means something different in each business. What does digital strategy mean to you? It’s often a quick tactical respond - moving spend into digital display ads, re-targeting and email within a CRM programme, search engine marketing. Or is it bigger than that, involving a…