3 Trends that will Drive Digital Transformation
Let's take a look at three ways you can drive digital transformation across your organization:
1. Understand Customer Behaviour
Who knew that it takes considerable effort to get people to go out? Most people fall into a rut of going home and staying in versus experiencing live events. Jennifer Betka, CMO of StubHub, candidly explained how hard it is to get people off the couch and has launched a new campaign to encourage people to grab their ticket out. It's a great rebranding campaign on not missing opportunities of a lifetime; the foundation of which was built on understanding customer behaviour.
If StubHub did not profile their audience and uncover the truth about the effort it takes to get people to go out, their campaign would not have been successful. It was necessary for StubHub to first understand their audience's behaviours and then speak to them as individuals. By putting in the time and effort to figure this out, they are now able to connect emotionally with people and identify target consumers across genres.
2. Personalize the Customer Experience
Google's Display Benchmark Tool reveals that 99.4% of online ads are ignored these days; in other words, marketing can seem like a big distraction to your buyers. The only way to fix this? Personalization! Dr. Volker Hildebrand, Global Vice President of Strategy, Customer Engagement, and Commerce at SAP Hybris, discussed how we can rethink personalization. He's been passionate about this topic for years and stressed that personalization, when done right, should not look like marketing, but rather feel like a great experience. It should leverage rich customer information in real-time and deliver messages consistently across channels. Marketers must pivot away from segmentation, since often (2 out of 3) customers are pulled into an incorrect segment. A move towards individualization is needed to become more targeted and relevant.
Unfortunately, this can be harder than it sounds. A 2015 study by Forrester Research, The Contextual Marketing Imperative, revealed large gaps in delivering personalization. The survey results showed that while 66% of marketers rate their personalization efforts every good or excellent, only 31% of customers believe that companies are consistently delivering a personalized, cross-channel experience. That's a big divide and means that, as marketers, we have a lot of work to do in this area.
3. Engage with Customers to Build Lifelong Relationships
True digital transformation is a journey with multiple layers and aspects. Autodesks VP of Customer Engagement, Jeff Wright, shared how Autodesk shifted to a subscription-based model, which started their companys digital transformation. It was an entire company effort that marketing played a major role in. In addition to focusing more on customer retention vs. acquisition, Autodesk also needed to improve customer engagement, and at the heart of their strategy was a shift in marketing from where Autodesk wanted to market to channels their customers were actually on. Becoming customer-centric and knowing the channels they're on earns you the right to be heard by your customers.
Courtesy:
Marketo blog
