Digital transformation: Measure what matters
Digital is not just a channel; it's a technology infrastructure that allows brands to better connect with, and understand, their customers. It's the technologies where brands can interface with consumers, but it's also the technologies that crunch complex datasets to allow a better understanding of your customer and market.
15 Oct 2020
Image by Joseph Mucira from Pixabay.
In the new paradigm, future-focused companies are seeking to transform their businesses, routes to market and customer experiences rapidly. A broadly encompassing and extensively used phrase for this is “digital transformation”. Wikipedia defines digital transformation as “the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses, through replacing non-digital or manual processes with digital processes or replacing older digital technology with newer digital technology.”
But there is something critical missing here. All digital transformation should be analytics-led. If you cannot measure what matters, you cannot improve your digital ecosystem, resulting in underperforming digital assets and underutilised digital platforms. Not to mention a lack of clarity as to what is effective about the work that’s working. Is it your brand messaging, creative expression or media strategy?
So what should you do about it?
Define a data infrastructure that effectively measures the performance of your digital strategy on a real-time basis. Institute the operational changes necessary to act on data-informed insights. And, of course, build an internal culture that appreciates the value of analytics-based competing.
Your goal is to build connected brand ecosystems that use all touchpoints data to effortlessly track and continuously improve the impact of your digital marketing.
You can expect improvements in four areas:
- Processes: Make significant time, resource and financial savings by automating repetitive tasks. Your staff can then focus their time on what’s valuable.
- Marketing investments: Discover patterns from your results to drive future improvement across channels, products and campaigns and identify ways to improve them.
- Staff capabilities: A grounding in analytics will help people make decisions with greater confidence and success.
- Risk management: Identify and mitigate the risks in your marketing to ensure that each campaign is better than the last.
An analytics-led approach requires a strategy built on an integrated technology stack to manage data governance, data extraction and transformation. This new strategy will empower your team to make better decisions, faster, and improve your return on marketing investment.
Outsmart your competition before they outsmart you.
About Matthys Esterhuysen
I have 16 years' experience in digital marketing, with an MBA somewhere along the way. I spent the last 8 years leading the digital strategy for some of South Africa's largest brands, including Toyota, Lexus, Cell C, South African Tourism, Barclays Africa, Absa and Fanta Global.
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