The scope of digital marketing has been evolving rapidly, and for anyone who is in a full-time digital marketing position, the constant introduction of new technologies, tools and best practices could easily feel overwhelming. The need for digital transformation is growing but if you don’t know where to start, it might wreak havoc rather than turn into a solution for a viable and long-lasting digital marketing strategy.
Based on my experience as a web marketing professional, I would summarize the road to digital transformation in three steps:
Step 1: Understand the ultimate goal—In a recent blog post my colleague Susan Koutalakis points out that account-based marketing, personalization and lead nurtures are the trendiest web marketing strategies for 2016. For the first time organizations have so much data about their users. If they manage to use it wisely, they could succeed on the road to targeting the right person with the right message, through the right channel and on the right device. Sounds easy when summarized in one sentence? Think about the systems that you might (not) have in place.
Step 2: Understand your company’s digital maturity—What systems does your company support for tracking the user journey, for aligning it with the sales strategy, for delivering the most personalized content through different marketing channels, and, finally, for measuring the success of all these campaigns? It is no secret that when we are immersed in the routine of our everyday work we might turn into proponents of legacy approaches and of a status quo that has no potential to bring long-lasting marketing success. To get you an unbiased understanding of where your marketing is today, I personally recommend you start with a self-assessment with the help of this “Digital Marketing Maturity Evaluation Guide”. It might help you identify gaps in your company’s strategy which you were not aware of, or highlight existing ones that you have been complaining about for ages… In either case, it will show you the pain points on which to focus your marketing strategy.
Step 3: Be proactive and get your hands dirty—I believe that any web marketer would support me when I say that this is the most difficult step. You know where you want to be and what the currently existing gaps are, now you need to evaluate the tools to get you there. In the current sea of (mostly siloed) tools this is an incredible challenge. A great tool that I can recommend to start with is Sitefinity Insight. It offers a blend of strong user journey analytics functionalities, personalization features and optimization capabilities which serve the ultimate goal of targeting your content to the right user and helping them convert.
At this point I am leaving it up to you to test—for me personally, the above three steps proved successful and helped me start my personal digital transformation journey. Good luck with yours!
Petya Popova-Chilikova
Petya Popova-Chilikova manages the DataDirect Demand Generation team at Progress. She has 6+ years of web marketing experience working at different technology companies. Prior to joining the DataDirect team, Petya had taken different roles in the Sitefinity marketing organization with a focus on lead generation programs, online advertising, marketing automation and lead nurturing, product launches, customer reference and partner co-marketing, event management and other areas.