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Drive Digital Transformation With These Imperative Skills

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Drive Digital Transformation With These Imperative Skills

It may seem counterintuitive, but as a business leader who’s interested in driving digital transformation, you need to focus on action steps rather than simply technologies themselves. To truly drive a digital shift, your entire organization must be on the same page while embracing change (in many ways) together. And while the particular steps and skills that are required for successful digital transformation may vary, a solid set must still be upheld for a digital shift to occur.

So, if you’re a business leader who wants to drive a digital shift, make sure that, before anything else, you define why digital transformation is necessary for you. In doing so, you’ll better understand how to take the action steps required to achieve your transformation goals and introduce scalable growth into your organization. To that end, let’s explore the most imperative skills necessary to drive digital transformation that is successful in the long term.

Defining digital transformation: what is it?

Before we go any further, let’s quickly cover what digital transformation is, exactly. Digital transformation, at its core, is the implementation of digital tools, technologies, business models, and platforms that all come together to establish differentiators that make organizations such as yours more competitive. As a strategy, digital transformation demands an emphasis on outcomes rather than simply tools and tech — these things are simply the catalysts that help drive a true, long-lasting digital shift.

Typically, businesses double down on digital transformation in the hopes of increasing revenue and mitigating potential risks. In the context of learning and development, the strategy of digital transformation is no novelty, but it’s accelerated rapidly in the wake of the pandemic thanks to an ever-changing business landscape and the need for businesses to connect their employees and customers with digitization.

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How to lay the groundwork for digital transformation

As a business leader, one of the most difficult aspects of cultivating digital change is getting all of your employees on board with it. Everyone needs to be on the same page and willing to accept – and wholeheartedly embrace – digital transformation. This is critical because, if people feel like they aren’t completely aware of why and how you’re driving digital transformation throughout your organization, they’ll be much more likely to feel hesitant to become part of something new and exciting together.

Part of that excitement stems from the opportunity for everyone to explore potential new technologies, platforms, and networks in the spirit of curiosity and open-mindedness. Employees who are excited about digital transformation and curious as to what may be in store will be more amenable toward being asked for their opinions on how they feel digital transformation should occur; they’ll also feel like their answers matter in the grand scheme of things as you redefine a digitized workplace culture.

To properly lay the groundwork for digital change, you must evaluate and communicate what works and what doesn’t – not just for your customers, but for your employees, staff, and stakeholders. It may be worthwhile to consider how businesses in industries different from your own have facilitated this type of open and honest communication; for example, local dental offices can communicate with patients via direct messaging and with their teams via team chat. These methods of communication are successful because they’ve proven reliable and easy to use for both customers and employees.

Design, redesign, and accelerate your processes

With digital transformation comes the exploration of exciting new tools, technologies, platforms, networks, and systems. This exploration makes it easier to optimize and streamline the experience of your customers, and certain technologies like AI/ML can go a long way toward reducing costs and accelerating processes that you can scale. This is when using something like business process management software (BPM) comes in handy.

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If you’re trying to accelerate processes that you repeat and that you need to scale, you need a tool that can help you analyze and update the core processes that drive your business. BPM software allows you to evaluate the different processes you use and identify areas for improvement. In doing so, you can quickly improve the efficiency and efficacy of your business.

It’s also important that you leverage design thinking to arrive at new processes that address the main needs of your customers and employees. If you’re designing – or redesigning – your business’s processes, it’s important to consider more than just the mechanics behind your processes; consider how the process benefits your customer experience and how that process can be reworked to provide even greater benefits.

Continue to iterate and scale

As you come to the end of your process designs and redesigns, you’ll begin to understand what was successful – and what wasn’t – when introducing your changes to customers and employees. It’s generally a good idea to hold some reviews and solicit organization-wide opinions that can inform your future decisions. During your open forums, discussing your results and deciding what your biggest lessons learned were can grant you insight into what to double down on and what to abandon in terms of process designs and redesigns. Once you’ve settled on what you’re scrapping and what you’re moving forward with, you can continue to tweak your processes to better address employee, customer, and stakeholder requirements.

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One final thing to remember: don’t forget to celebrate and scale. Digital transformation is never really over — it’s up to you to look toward the future for your next big change. With that said, you should take the opportunity to breathe and acknowledge that you successfully piloted changes that made positive impacts.

Give some words of encouragement to the teams that were involved in your piloting, and maybe consider holding some award ceremonies for team members who significantly stood out. As you shift your focus back toward scaling your pilot results, make sure you have the right tools to keep scaling as you implement your digital transformation efforts.

Conclusion

Making a big shift requires your entire organization to be on the same page, embracing change (in many ways) together. While the steps and skills needed for success will vary in nuance from company to company, there is a solid set that must be upheld to make a successful digital shift.

Before anything else, define why a digital transformation is necessary for you –you’ll better understand how to take appropriate steps to meet new goals and invite scalable growth.

Get your people on board with embracing change by making it less scary and more about being part of something exciting together. Explore potential new tech, networks, and platforms with curiosity and an open mind, asking for opinions when needed to determine your best options.

No matter what your process looks like, it’s critical that as you redesign and redefine your digital sphere, you evaluate and communicate about what works and what doesn’t – not just for your customers, but for your employees, staff, and stakeholders.

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12 AI Tools to Help You Grow Your Blog

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12 AI Tools to Help You Grow Your Blog

OK, you get it. Artificial intelligence is kind of a big deal. It’s a huge buzzword in the marketing community, with people talking daily about how it’ll change the world. And you can’t throw a rock without hitting a company with AI in the name these days.

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Salesforce summer 2023 release: The business executive’s guide

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Salesforce summer 2023 release: The business executive's guide

Salesforce’s summer release delivers a series of enhancements to improve the user experience and saving time through efficiency. After all, what good is a tool if it’s challenging to use and takes up a bunch of time that none of us have? 

Highlights covered in this edition include admin and CRM enhancements, Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), and feature upgrades for Commerce.

Admin and CRM enhancements 

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a first-time user of Salesforce, these admin and CRM enhancement enable you to customize the experience and find things faster.

  • Layout. Imagine trying to read a book, but the words are all jumbled together, making it nearly impossible to understand. Before the latest layout updates, that’s how Salesforce used to feel for many users — especially first-timers. The updated layout includes consolidated address fields, phone numbers, and well-spaced elements to improve readability and navigability. In addition, you can now align fields horizontally for user adoption and data visibility.
  • Optimized app pages. Users can customize and optimize app pages, making information more accessible and digestible for users. Maximizing and minimizing sections of pages will help you and your team find what you’re looking for faster, which means less time spent scrolling.   
  • Gender-neutral salutations. The importance of honoring all of your customers cannot be overstated. Salesforce has adopted gender-neutral salutations so you can better reflect the diversity of your customers. An “Mx.” salutation is now available, which is a significant step towards making everyone feel seen and valued.
  • Customizable dashboards. The dashboard, which has been a significant source of frustration, is now customizable and can be tailored to your customers with the ability to add custom images and text. Plus, you can add up to five filters and focus your dashboard. All this is to say that you can set your workspace to suit your needs and preferences, making it more efficient and narrowly tailored for your target audience.
  • Updated calendar. The last important update in this section is that the calendar feature has been revamped to include a drag-and-drop capability to move events around easily. Plus, there are now overlapping event tiles and color-coded events for better usability. Updates to calendar functions have been a longtime request by Salesforce users, and the upgrades are exciting because they lead to increased productivity. 
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Account Engagement 

Salesforce’s Account Engagement, formerly known as Pardot, has received several significant updates to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

  • Completed actions + external actions. Trigger partner completion actions with external actions in the same setup. Previously, external actions had to be triggered via Engagement Studio, but you can use your Account Engagement platform and third-party tools to automatically create a multi-touch experience while also creating operational efficiencies between marketing systems. Let’s say you have a user fill out a form on your site. You can now automatically register them via your webinar tool. You can also create an automatic second touch by sending them a text message after the form completion. 
  • Optimizer tool. The new optimizer tool for Account Engagement allows users to see how the tool and your business unit(s) are operating at any time. This includes identifying areas to improve your overall performance, which in turn creates more efficient touchpoints for your customer.  A great example of the tool at work is identifying the overuse of automation rules that can slow overall operational processes ‘behind the scenes’ (which can delay critical communications to your customers!). In digital, every second counts; Optimizer’s ability to surface risks to Account Engagement users means you’ll be spending time fixing automations rather than manually auditing your tool.
  • Data Cloud. Account Engagement now works with Salesforce Data Cloud (formerly Salesforce CDP) to connect data from multiple sources and unify that data into unified customer profiles. Once unified profiles are available, Account Engagement users can segment and personalize their customer communications, driving increased engagement and revenue.
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Guest check-out upgrade among Commerce enhancements

Several significant updates that enhance customer experience were included in this release: upgrades to guest checkout, a self-service reorder portal, a Pay Now feature, and saved payment methods.

  • Guest check-out feature. Allows customers to browse and check out anonymously, making the shopping experience faster and less intrusive.
  • Self-service reorder portal. Simplifies the process of placing repeat orders, saving time and effort. 
  • Pay Now: Makes it easier to process payments without going through the checkout process by letting businesses send a URL or a page to a customer so they can make a payment immediately. Think of it as skipping the line and going straight to the cashier.
  • Saved payment methods.  Also enables quicker checkouts by eliminating the need to re-enter payment information each time. This feature mimics a digital wallet, only you don’t need to dig around to find your credit card. 

Want to see all the details? The full Salesforce Summer ‘23 Release notes are here. 


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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


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About the author

Joe Anzalone

Joe is Vice President, Salesforce Technology at Shift7 Digital. As a member of the Shift7 leadership team, Joe works to craft solutions and architectures that meet ambitious client goals using the power of the Salesforce platform, including product ownership for Shift7’s Industry GTM Accelerators. Joe brings more than 20 years of experience implementing Salesforce and other digital platforms including enterprise solutions and complex technology implementations. He sits on the Salesforce B2B Commerce product advisory board. Shift7 Digital is a Salesforce Ventures-backed agency, revolutionizing the digital experience for manufacturers, distributors, and their customers.

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AI Has Made the Customer Value Journey More Powerful: Here’s Why

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AI Has Made the Customer Value Journey More Powerful: Here's Why

If you are reading this article, chances are that you know something about Ryan Deiss and his Customer Value Journey. Ryan literally built a marketing education empire on the concept of this framework.

It’s so important to the DigitalMarketer community that he even has the original napkin version framed like a relic to be viewed like the Mona Lisa.

1685911250 528 AI Has Made the Customer Value Journey More Powerful Heres

My name is James Bullis. I am a Marketing Technologist / Webmaster with over 25 years in the industry.
I remember when I first learned about this concept around 15 years ago.

It was originally called Customer Value Optimization and had an entirely different structure. I’m a web designer and when I started working in this industry I started out in marketing.

When I became a web designer, I didn’t understand that a business web design is a part of a business’
marketing plan. After learning more about marketing, I realized how I could put these concepts into the website and use them to create a better website experience for my customers’ website visitors.

Then the along came the Customer Value Journey (CVJ) which was a fundamental upgrade and made the entire foundational framework make more sense. It essentially closed the loop and created an endless flywheel of customers if applied correctly.

It really played well in helping to understand how a business website should be laid out so that the traffic could be funneled through the Customer Value Journey.

The CVJ is not the only part of this foundational framework. It is usually accompanied by an Ideal Client Avatar and the Before & After exercise. Essentially, you need to understand who you want to help and be able to empathize with them to discover how you can bring value by easing their pain.

But there is a real problem when it comes to the CVJ that I have noticed over the years. It seems to me that no one will sit down and do it.

Do I know this for a fact? No. But, I can guess with some authority that most people who have learned this framework skip over it in practice.

This became obvious to me some years ago inside of DigitalMarketer Engage – the Facebook group of people who have spent some time and money with DigitalMarketer to engage with other members to talk about the frameworks, get advice, and learn from each other.

You could always tell when a fresh wave of members would join because the same questions were asked repeatedly.

These were questions that could simply be answered if they took the time to go through the process of completing these exercises for each new campaign or business that they started to work on as marketers.

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I don’t know why people skip over these foundational steps. The framework itself along with the worksheets probably make the concept seem simple and insignificant but it is a powerful exercise that will save you a ton of time, money, and resources.

Years ago, DigitalMarketer invited people to a conference in Austin to learn some amazing new concepts that were going to change the way we thought about digital marketing.

I was excited. I packed up. Headed to Texas. Arrived at the event. Sat down. Excited to learn something new when the guys came out and began talking about…the CVJ. The avatar. The before and after exercise.

I was a bit dumbfounded and a little bit angry at myself when I realized that this framework…was the secret. And I realized that I was not taking the time to do these exercises.

I realized that I wanted to spend my time learning about these frameworks and exercises but I myself was not implementing them. I did something drastic when I left that event. I went home and disconnected myself from everything DigitalMarketer and I decided that I wouldn’t invest in learning any new concepts until I started with these fundamentals.

For years, I worked on numerous projects, and I took a stand to make sure that we sat down and did the work. This is what I discovered.

Why the Customer Value Journey Is STILL Essential

The CVJ is essential because it answers the most important questions that everyone who works with a
business needs to know:

  1. Who Do You Help?
  2. How Do You Help?
  3. Why Does It Matter?

It’s also important because it puts this information in a format that can be shared with anyone who works on a business including sales, marketing, and technology. If my clients already had a CVJ for their business when I started designing and building a new website for them, it would be so much easier to create a website that actually gets results.

If the information that is contained in a CVJ were given to a graphic designer, marketing contractor, customer service rep, sales rep, consultant, anyone…this would make working the clients and ensuring their success so much easier. We call it greasing the skids because it makes it outlines everything that needs to be done in a simple to understand and comprehend format.

After using this framework on any new projects, I don’t know how I could realistically provide value to my clients if I didn’t help them create their CVJ.

The CVJ Is an Experiment in Marketing

Everything that we do in marketing is an experiment. Every little decision we make is a series of experiments that lead us to always be optimizing. No matter how far we’ve come, we can always do it better. For that reason, the CVJ is more of a living document that changes over time as the campaigns that you work on. A business can have multiple CVJs.

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Think about it. You can get this process wrong because chances are you and your customer are just guessing about what will work. The more you do it, the easier it will be for you to ensure your customer’s success, but chances are, if you are creating a CVJ for a customer, they probably never completed one before and these concepts are new.

You can get it wrong. In fact, you can get it wrong and waste time, money, and resources by targeting the wrong people. Last year, I did a session with a client where we went through the process of mapping out their Ideal Customer Avatar, Before & After Exercise, and CVJ.

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For months we created content, updated the website, and ran social media campaign. It wasn’t until we expanded on these exercises with AI that we realized that we were targeting the wrong prospect. Now we can avoid that.

The CVJ Is Easier To Create Than Ever with AI

If I were to ask a group of marketers why they did not use a framework to conduct their marketing, I would imagine that the main consensus would be that the act of sitting down with your client and getting a full understanding of these concepts is not something that you or your client really want to do.

In the mind of the client, you should just know this information (by some miracle). The reality is that every business is different and while you may be able to repeat the concepts in these exercises, having the exercises completed and documented will save you a lot of time and heartache in the long run.

I love the quote from Lincoln that says, “If given six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening my axe.”

This concept is true in so many aspects of business but as I said before, if you take the time to document the CVJ, ICA, and Before and After exercise, you will be so far along that you’ll make your life a lot easier.

Well, now we have this thing called AI. And what I have discovered about AI is that it is really suited to help solve this problem. In fact, now that I have started to use AI to help create this foundation, I can’t help but generate the concepts, expand on them, and make some of the most focused content that speaks directly to the prospect.

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The CVJ framework is essential to success as a marketer. Now with the help of AI tools, you can take any framework and inject it with steroids to create comprehensive marketing foundation that can literally transform your marketing campaigns.

Not only can you generate expanded versions of these foundational frameworks, but you can now use them to reference when creating content to build awareness and increase engagement with your audience.

The dawn of AI in digital marketing is an exciting one, offering boundless opportunities to strengthen and streamline the strategies we use. Leveraging the capabilities of AI, the creation and application of foundational frameworks such as the Customer Value Journey (CVJ), Ideal Client Avatar (ICA), and the Before & After exercise, can be profoundly amplified.

Gone are the days where marketers neglect these critical steps due to their time-consuming nature or the perceived complexity. With AI, we are able to enhance these processes, reduce the margin for error, and ultimately deliver more targeted and impactful content.

In my personal journey as a web designer turned marketing technologist, I have seen the value these tools bring to the table, but also witnessed their neglect. Utilizing AI, we can change this trend, ensuring that these valuable resources are used to their fullest potential.

By taking the time to implement these tools properly, we not only provide immense value to our clients but also create a better experience for the end user, leading to more successful marketing campaigns.

As digital marketers, we have an exciting path ahead of us. Armed with the transformative power of AI, we can take the wisdom encapsulated in the CVJ and other frameworks and unleash it on a grander scale than ever before.

In an era where every business decision is becoming data-driven, the advent of AI ensures that the nuances of human insight remain central to our marketing strategies.

It allows us to balance the scales between data and empathy, between efficiency and effectiveness, and, ultimately, between the business and the customer. So, as we step into the future of digital marketing, let us remember to carry these valuable lessons forward, and embrace the tools that AI provides to augment our journey.


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