Why Digital Transformation Should Be Your Strategic Priority

In every business cycle, new leaders are emerging within every vertical. The common element is their ability of embracing new technologies present on the horizon.

We are present in the Fourth Industrial Age, which urges enterprises to become digital-ready. Digital transformation streamlines business operations to deliver competent and relevant customer solutions as well as adopt current opportunities of the digital era.

Why Go Digital?

89% of consumers visit Google, Bing, or any other search engine to find information about products or services. There is an exponential rise in the use of Internet; it is no longer a niche marketing channel but a worthy future investment. Online channels are the most economical method of reaching out to a large, astute, and knowledgeable target audience.

About 1.3 billion people are now connected on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. It is a huge market for enterprise to penetrate and analyze customer buying behavior to deliver personalized user experience.   

Digital Transformation offers endless opportunities and benefits such as improved real-time interaction with customers, accurate insights, better inventory management, accessing new customer segments, higher productivity, better resource allocation, effective forecasting and efficient business decisions.

Millenials: The New Customer

Gen Y or millennials represent the new target audience for enterprises, which presents unique challenges to marketers. The prosumer is well-aware about the latest technology trends that demands enterprises to be digital-ready.

Reaching out to the millennials will require you to digitally disrupt your value proposition. Proven technologies include QR codes, social media marketing, and user-friendly URLs. The need of the hour is mobile optimization to attract millennials as they use smartphones for all aspects ranging from finding a local vendor to reading customer reviews; thus, your content should be easily readable and navigable.

Top Reasons Why You Should Go Digital?

The Financial Times reported in June 2016 that the world’s wealthy are warning their investment managers to upgrade their digital services or face losing the approximately $1trn that passes down each year to the next generation.

Millenials, i.e. customers between 18 and 35 years of age, are vocal nowadays about how enterprises must digitally disrupt their business model. In a study conducted by LinkedIn last year found that social media presence is a must-have for brands. 

Digital disruption has the following benefits:

• Search results: If what you are looking for is not present on Google, then it doesn’t exist; customers are constantly turning to search engines for getting information related to products or services before arriving at a purchase decision. Modern consumers are dependent on Internet and online research.
• Combination of content marketing and social media marketing expands your audience reach.
• Track progress: Customers can easily monitor the progress and success of an online business. Even an online business can use analytics to track the site’s performance; for instance, you can track the number of clicks, views, or responses for your campaign/product without spending much.
• Target market: Get to know your niche with your online presence. You get real-time information related to the demographics as well as number of site visitors – their tastes and preferences, country of origin etc. it is easy to track bounce rates i.e. for how long did a visitor stay on your website.
• Benefits of automation: The traditional method of office communication involves printing a document, walking it over to fax machine/another office and then wait for a receipt. However, with the help of digital disruption, employees will become more productive and focused.
• Data storage: Earlier information was stored in files (department-wise), which was highly inefficient. It was tedious to store huge volumes of essential data in cabinets and browse through it whenever required. Now, with the help of apps and other software, companies are getting more organized in data archiving.
• Eco-friendly: Digital transformation helps enterprises go paperless and thus reduce costs and protect the environment as well.
• Affordability: Digital transformation is cost-effective. The paperwork and huge volumes of data can be stored as a backup on an online medium or external USB drive. In addition, you do not require a huge workforce to maintain your website. Enterprise collaboration systems allow employees to download relevant content thereby developing efficient communication systems across the entire organization.
• Profitability: Online marketing promises a huge ROI for enterprises. With the number of digital users on the rise, digital transformation will prove to be a profitable solution for you.
• Customer interaction:  With the help of digital technologies, enterprises should provide customers a unique reading experience. Digital content should contain useful links, images, videos etc. the influence of digital media cannot be ignored.

If you are not yet digital/online, you are definitely missing out. Transform user experience by helping them find you, review your performance, and offer a comfortable experience that is quick and easy.

Why now

It is now or never. Every company requires a sound digital strategy to gain competitive edge. Industry verticals such as automobiles, consumer products, travel, hospitality etc. are adopting digital technologies rapidly to meet the high level of customer expectations. Therefore, going digital is the best solution to gain a competitive edge as it will help you analyze new entrants and strengthen supplier-customer relationships. 

You are left with no other option but going digital. The last decade has seen digital disruption of business models to an extent that non-adopters who doubted this model’s sustainability are now being forced to re-strategize and realign their business models with the new entrants.  
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A digital business model is comparatively low cost in nature and some of the businesses do not even have to own assets in physical form and not have any existing infrastructure. A typical example is a platform-based business model for travel and hospitality sector. Now a customer can plan holidays even when he/she is on the go, using travel apps like Expedia, MakeMytrip etc. 

By 2020, 25 billion objects will be connected to internet. Hence, businesses will need to be agile and scale quickly to stay ahead and be future ready.

Digital transformation will also lead to an increase in data generation from multiple sources. It will give enterprises an opportunity to interact with customers and advise them new products/services based on their past shopping experiences.

This option will materialize only when enterprises are about digitizing the entire customer journey and experience by providing real-time access to products and services on mobile devices. Complacency in this area increases chances of you missing out.

Want help with your digital transformation journey? Talk to our experts