Every large-scale organization today has employees separated into different teams and scattered across the business (often across geographies). Many of those people are now working from home and more disconnected than ever.
If teams aren’t careful, fragmented information and disconnected processes can quickly hamper progress. According to an analysis by McKinsey, in an average workweek, employees spend 20% of their time “looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.” That’s why it’s important for members of the organization to come together with shared tools, knowledge and processes to achieve common goals.
Many organizations are turning to digital strategies to foster cross-department success in business growth and customer service — particularly now that physical sales and marketing events are off the table. While it’s true that digital transformation can have far-reaching implications across a company, marketing arguably has the most to gain. According to Frost & Sullivan’s 2019 “Top End User Priorities in Digital Transformation” report, which surveyed 1,636 IT decision makers, more than two-thirds of organizations believe sales and marketing departments will be most impacted by digital transformation.
What Will Marketing Gain From Digital Transformation?
For most organizations, the twin goals of digital transformation are increasing organizational efficiency and improving customer experience. In fact, these goals should be directly linked: increasing efficiency in order to improve customer experience.
While the implications of this notion are far-reaching for marketing, one key ramification is ensuring organizational cohesiveness, consistency and responsiveness. From marketing messages and materials to customer journey and touch points, each disparate business line or geography should speak with one voice and engage customers with a consistent experience.
The larger an organization, the more important this brand consistency, yet, the harder it becomes to maintain. Digitalization, thus, becomes a dual-edged sword for marketing: It can supercharge the ability of disparate teams and geographies to “roll their own” chaotic approach in tweaking digital assets, campaigns, customer engagement, etc. Versioning challenges, inconsistent approval processes, local or individual preferences, and different (and often incompatible) systems and software can all contribute to the mayhem.
Conversely, digital can be a transformation for global marketing. Materials can be easily findable, rapidly propagated and consistently delivered, while customer experience can be cohesive across systems, offerings and geographies. Best practices and successful campaigns can be quickly identified, iterated and disseminated across teams. The overall result can be a dramatic improvement in organizational cohesion, agility and responsiveness.
Breaking Silos
One important roadblock to consider for any digital transformation is the existence of silos. Whether those are organizational, geographic or systemic, they will hinder the drive for consistency and efficiency. From a marketing perspective, those silos might be at the team or business level, driven by geography, or they might be a reflection of disparate systems and procedures.
The right approach to digital transformation can eliminate silos without the need to scrap everything and start from scratch. The answer lies in the use of automation to wrap and connect silos so that their existence no longer matters — not so much “breaking them” as making them disappear. For marketing, this might take the form of a unified content repository/dissemination, or automation that pulls and presents data insights from various tools, or process automation to route a customer journey through various systems.
In all cases the key consideration is that this automation eliminates the delays, errors and inconsistency that exists in manual approaches and disconnected silos.
Centering Excellence
Every transformation is a journey, and like any journey, it’s necessary to get and stay on track. For digital transformations, many organizations look to maintain bearings using what’s known as a center of excellence (CoE), which Gartner describes as “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.” For marketing transformation, this means centralizing and sharing best practices across teams and identifying potential opportunities for digital media and technology to better meet marketing goals.
In creating a CoE, it’s important to begin holistically with the business’ long-term goals. What is marketing trying to achieve, and how does it support the larger business plan? How does marketing collaborate with and support other parts of the organization? Outlining specific objectives and best practices will guide team members within the organization in sharing resources and streamlining processes.
Since we’re talking about digital transformation, the members of that CoE must embrace agility and innovation. This isn’t about the digital technology itself as much as the business transformation; it means identifying change, understanding risk and moving rapidly to adjust and improve.
With objectives and teams in place, it’s important to identify how to measure success. This means not only establishing the key performance indicators (KPIs) but also the metrics relevant to the CoE itself (resource utilization, best practice propagation, etc.), along with assigned responsibility for achieving each goal.
The CoE should encapsulate a library of go-to marketing materials to drive consistency and efficiency. These materials could be as simple as document templates (for case studies, e-books, etc.) to branding kits or process guides. Clear and centralized assets and processes lead to faster iteration, as members across the organization gain visibility into successful campaigns. Without this insight, teams might duplicate efforts or wander in directions that don’t match the overall business plan.
The CoE also plays a critical role in keeping the transformation on track and constantly adapting. This is one journey that’s never done, and an iterative methodology ensures relevance as the organization evolves. Done correctly, the CoE helps enforce consistency, currency and collaboration.
Automation And Excellence In Action
The combination of automation and a CoE can drive cohesive transformation, ensuring a company’s digital assets are available to everyone, ready for use as needed. This can allow marketing leads to proactively monitor what is being used inside and outside the organization, and understand where to concentrate for continuous improvement.
Most marketing departments are ripe for digital transformation. Done correctly, it can have an outsized impact on the organization as a whole.
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How To Bring Digital Transformation To Marketing - Forbes
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