Humans are rapidly evolving, and so are their demands. Your brand must be ever-improving if you want to stay relevant among the consumers. One such recent development in your customers is the media they consume. Almost all of them are consuming digital media in one form or another. They often even prefer digital modes over others. This should be taken as a sign for your company to turn digital.
What Do We Mean By Digital Transformation?
Digital Transformation means to use of digital technology to complete or achieve everyday mundane tasks to tasks directed towards a bigger goal. Having a business transform digitally means modifying all business requirements, especially marketing ones, and achieving it using digital means.
Digitally transforming your business allows your brand to reach customers where they want to be and learn what their wants and needs are. This will allow you to cater to these needs and let people be aware of your brand, resulting in exponential growth.
However, before you go ahead and digitally transform your brand, there are some crucial steps you need to take to ensure a smooth transition. This blog will help you identify and take those steps so that your business can receive the growth and recognition it deserves:
- Recognize Goals
When you think about your business goals, you may be imagining your company to be the next Google. While it is certainly possible, we mean recognizing goals achievable within the coming year. You must derive realistic goals from your current business measurements. When transforming, you must first digitalize the process that makes the most impact on your business and customers. This will allow you to be consistent with your methods.
- Hype Up the Transformation
With new methods implemented comes wariness. Your employees and customers who were accustomed to the manual version of your business, may feel confused and often frustrated if they are not made aware of the transformation beforehand. This is why you must let all the concerned parties know, and ensure they are comfortable with the transformation. If either the customers or the employees are not comfortable, you must boost their confidence in terms of technology. Otherwise, they might feel dejected when availing of your services or products, resulting in losing customers and employee support.
- KPIs are important
The best part of digital transformation in business is that your devices themselves can measure many useful metrics for your brand. The useful metrics are called KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. KPIs can be the average time needed to gain a new customer, customer satisfaction with your platform, and more. Set achievable KPIs for your business. Digitalizing your brand should improve your KPIs. Research more on this, and find the ideal KPIs your brand should have once it is digitalized. This will help you gauge your brand’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Research before Investment
Many companies make an extremely critical mistake during digitalization: not conducting adequate research before investing. You must keep in mind, your company is unique, and so are your employees and customers. Even if you have the budget to purchase the fanciest tools and technology for your business, your customers and employees might not feel comfortable with it. Hence, perform research on all parties involved and find out what kind of technology they are accustomed to. Purchase tools for your company accordingly.
- Maintain Company Culture
Company culture is extremely important for your business to run smoothly. It keeps the morale high and customers satisfied. When you revolutionize your business, every minute task carried out will be impacted by it. This will cause a major change in your company culture, which can lead to disputes and conflicts, making your brand less efficient. Ensure your company culture does not change for the worse. Keep the tense employees and customers satisfied, and provide them with perks or employee engagement activities to lighten their mood.
- Be Patient
None of the revolutions we read about in history has occurred overnight. Rather, they have taken months or even years to fully ‘revolutionize’. Similarly, you can not expect your business to revolutionize overnight. Many companies have broken down their digitalization into parts. To not overwhelm their employees, they digitalized a set of tasks, giving them ample time to get accustomed to one new method before the other comes along.
- Keep an Eye on KPIs
As mentioned earlier, KPIs are extremely important for one to gauge brand performance. Setting KPIs is important, but keeping track of them is equally important. This is because you can calculate the trend of your business and understand if your next KPI goal should be higher or lower. You can always make changes to your plan; however, we suggest calculating and predicting trends for the next 5 years.
- Digitalization Feedback
Taking feedback after any minor to major change is all necessary. Likewise, a huge process such as digitalization requires one to take feedback from customers and employees. Especially pay attention to customer feedback since their experience is vital for your business to keep going. You do not have to limit this survey to your website or customers. You can send out surveys to viewers watching your online video advertisements on social media or other platforms.
- Celebrate Small and Big Victories
Any sort of change is difficult for everyone. Especially if the change alters the way one carries out daily tasks. To keep everyone motivated and excited, one should celebrate all victories, big or small. The celebration does not have to be large; you can simply bring donuts for everyone. Something as small as this will brighten up everyone’s day and fuel them with energy.
Conclusion
Knowing these 9 steps is vital to ensure your business has little to no bumps on the road to digital transformation. This revolutionary time in your business may feel difficult but rest assured it will be extremely impactful and if carried out correctly, it can cause your company to sky-rocket in the KPIs and bring about exponential growth.
