How your marketing strategy can ensure successful digital transformation

A guide to successful digital transformation

A recent study reported that only 2 percent of advertisers are making the most of data-driven marketing, so there is a very real chance that your business is among the 98 percent whose marketing strategy is missing the boat.

Once you’ve acknowledged this shortcoming in your marketing strategy, technology can contribute hugely toward ensuring a better understanding of who your customer is, and how to create a customer experience that delivers meaningful engagement with your brand, at every step of that customer’s journey, particularly when you bring out the big guns of marketing automation.

How difficult will it be to add automation to your marketing strategy?

If, at this point, you’re concerned that you may need an MBA in order to do this yourself or outsource it to a tech team… stop, breathe and focus.

We’ve simplified the often overwhelming world of dos and don’ts when it comes to producing an effective marketing strategy to support your digital transformation, by referring to a Think With Google guide of five fundamental principles, referred to as the five As – Audience, Assets, Access, Attribution, and Automation.

Now let’s unpack them and get you well on your way to producing a marketing strategy that takes you from where you are, to where you see your business going, while at the same time creating a digital metamorphosis for your brand and producing positive customer experiences.

Audience

First things first. Make sure you’re speaking to the right people. Once you’ve identified them, organize your data sources in such a way that you’re able to understand customer behavior and engage meaningfully. We’ve narrowed this down to three basic steps:

• Get a bird’s eye view of all your customer data, both online and offline.

• Combine your data into a single tool that allows you to understand your customers’ long-term value.

• Set a targeting strategy that allows you to reach your customer at every part of their shopping journey, across various media.

Assets

It’s all about the experience. Finding the customer is half the battle won. Delivering a compelling customer experience is how you retain them. Make sure you produce relevant, context-sensitive marketing materials that remove obstacles and friction points in the customer journey. If you do your homework and understand the intention, needs, and behavior of the customer, you can produce marketing materials that directly address these factors.

Access

Reaching your customers at every point of the shopping journey and enabling them to access as much as possible of your available inventory is of utmost importance. Technology makes it possible to get a snapshot of all your media channels to manage frequency and create transparency across all media spend.

Attribution

It’s important to measure the role played by every contact point which your customers have with your brand. With customers choosing to shop across multiple channels, it’s likely that customers will engage with your brand on various devices and across channels, before actually committing to a purchase. It’s therefore critical that your attribution model considers various channels and devices so that you’re effectively able to analyze the journey which your customers take along the way to buying your products or services, and then attribute the relevant weighting to each touch point on the shopping journey.

Automation

Marketing automation has moved beyond being a cost-cutting tool. When used correctly, it should simplify operations, while simultaneously improving the customer experience. Don’t be overwhelmed by the huge amounts of data that your digital marketing campaigns will produce. Clever marketing automation means that you can automate keywords, bids, assets, targeting, and attribution.

Now build your marketing strategy around these principles and take the anxiety out of digital transformation. You’ll soon be creating enriched customer experiences that elevate your brand. If you’re interested in learning more, read our recent article which looks at how chatbots can help to improve business automation.