How to navigate the new digital reality

Your customer experience is also driven by your marketing strategy. To stay top of mind for increasingly digital consumers, your marketing must account for the full customer journey. Your marketing needs to be memorable, tailored, high-impact and real-time to give your customers what they want before they even know they want it. Leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as marketing automation solutions, can help bridge the gap between your creative marketing efforts and what your customers really want and need to hear from you. 

For SteelSeries, a manufacturer of gaming peripherals and accessories, including headsets, keyboards, mice, and mousepads, the company reached a point where further market share growth could no longer be achieved by investing in lower-funnel marketing activities. Instead, the company evolved its strategy to embrace the full customer journey utilising personalised creatives and machine learning and soon found a 127% increase in their return on advertising spend (ROAS). 

In the end, by learning more about your clients, their needs, their behaviours, and how they use your product or service, you’ll be able to create better-connected services and experiences to meet and exceed their expectations.

A digital team to deliver

The need to move quickly has never been greater. The current crisis has forced businesses to find faster ways to operate and faster ways to work with their customers, suppliers and fellow employees. For example, a global telco provider redeployed 1,000 store employees to inside sales and retrained them in three weeks. 

That wouldn’t be possible without digital. Digital will continue to drive speed and agility in businesses across every industry going forward.

Chemical distribution manufacturer Brenntag acknowledged this fact a few years ago and launched a startup offshoot of the company to act as a platform for working on new design innovations, as well as to allow Brenntag to be more efficient and prioritise their customers’ experiences. 

You can put your company and team in a better position to thrive in the new digital reality by adopting flatter, more agile organisational models and multidisciplinary teams. Teams with the right mindset for achieving fast results, and that test and learn quickly. Companies that have led the way in adopting these models have shown substantial improvements in both execution pace and productivity according to McKinsey, and this has only accelerated during the pandemic. Organisations in every industry are scaling up digitally by creating interdisciplinary teams that are directly aligned to the business’ digital priorities.

For example, the Dutch bank ABN AMRO, started up an initiative outside the structures of the bank to try to reimagine the process for entrepreneurs to apply for loans and seek financial assistance. The New10 initiative offers entrepreneurs the best of two worlds: the flexibility of a startup with the financial knowledge of a well-established bank. Now entrepreneurs can apply for loans, upload financial data, sign contracts, etc. all digitally through New10. 

By identifying business areas where digital execution velocity is needed, organisations can develop plans to staff and support them and make necessary changes to their operating model to ensure teams are built to succeed. 

Flexible technology platforms and architectures

Businesses need the tools and platforms in place to accelerate digital growth. Once your digital reality is live, these systems will support and enable your teams to continuously measure and evolve. Because the digital reality is here for the long-run.

One such example of a company embracing digital technology to accelerate growth is Indigo Ag, which is focused on increasing our planet’s capacity to produce food sustainably through microbiology, machine learning and digital technologies. In order to reinvent agriculture, the company created software to support farmers every step of the way, from planting to crop harvest, delivery and payment. 

For technology to be a real driver of innovation and growth, businesses need to strike a balance between modernising their existing investments while capitalising on new innovations. Scalable platforms, API’s and flexible solutions drive revenue, flexibility and speed. Technology should no longer be a burden but a competitive advantage to successfully build your digital business. By serving a top-of-the-line digital customer experience, you put your business at the forefront of technology and at the top of its game.

With speed and agility being more important than ever, the key to success is to digitise specific business processes rather than attempting a complete digital overhaul of your tech systems. One example would be to take a look at your web and app strategies, as these are areas that can enable fast and scalable development, helping to unlock greater control over your users’ digital experiences.

Businesses should also be reevaluating their technology roadmap and looking at planned upgrades and updates to their existing software to ensure it aligns to the digital strategy that has become abundantly necessary in the last few months. This requires a keen understanding of your business challenges and your requirements to create a robust and flexible architecture that will help you serve your customers. For Johnson Matthey (JM), a global leader in sustainable technologies, there was a recognised need for an updated, more powerful content management system (CMS) to help futurise the company’s digital presence. The company’s digital estate was decentralised and disparate. With a business focus on adopting a digital-first approach, a centralised CMS (in this case, Sitecore) for all products, services, markets and languages was needed. 

Selecting the right tech partner is one of the most important decisions a modern business can make. The CMS, CRM and e-commerce platform markets are broad, and navigating the various offerings can be a challenge. But it’s important to choose a solution that will marry the long term and short term goals of your company and give you the tools to succeed both in a consumer-facing capacity and at an operational level. 

The time is now to build and accelerate your digital business

The need to digitise processes and customer experiences has been apparent for years, but it took a global pandemic to really accelerate the digital transformation of every industry in every part of the world. The idea of returning to a pre-pandemic “normal” is becoming increasingly far fetched, but in some ways maybe that will end up being a positive thing. Maybe the strides made in digital innovation during this challenging time will improve our lives so much that we won’t want to go back to the way things were before. 

So, the time is now. To build for speed, flexibility and customer experience. Going forward, businesses need to be in a position to quickly react, respond and adapt, and those businesses with a strong digital foundation will find themselves in a much better position to do just that. 

If you want to learn more, please join us on September 10th 2020 for a virtual talk we are hosting with Forrester Research. Our founder and CTO, Bart Manuel, will be joined by Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, Ted Schadler, to discuss the secrets for building and accelerating your digital business. Based on Forrester’s recent report, “Digital Rewrites the Rules of Business,” the talk will show you how the most successful brands and companies are using creativity, data and technology to deliver effective customer experiences.