Today, CMOs and Marketing teams play a very important role in digital transformation. As per a survey by Gartner, 80% of CMOs report that they are solely responsible for or play a leading role in their company’s digital business transformation strategy. Gone are the days when marketing departments were more looked at just branding partners, now they are more than that. They form a very crucial team for generating business leads and are great influencers in the journey of developing business. Marketing is a whole new game with measuring tools, loads of analytics and retrieving meaningful data to help businesses take better profitable decisions.
In marketing and for marketers using communications platforms, emails and interactive web application is just part of the digital transformation journey. There is much more they are adopting, learning, and executing to align marketing and business goals. They are leading business initiatives focusing on building new experiences, new channels, and new go-to-market strategies, which will help in attracting new customers or prospective leads. Digital transformation has opened up opportunities for marketers to study and select the best platforms and tools at their hand, allowing them to have a multichannel presence. With this, marketers are establishing two-way communication with their customers, and they are becoming the first point of contact in the journey of sales before the actual sales team comes into the picture. Digital tools and strategies are now fuel to businesses and a digital transformation is a vital tool in optimizing the customer and business experience. Digital marketing insights and data are helping organisations on the path to gaining valuable information about consumers and building better relationships with customers.
Marketing and digital transformation influence
The heart of marketing is the customer funnel or lead generation funnel which has now gone digital. Marketers can now influence the customer at each stage of the funnel – Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Intent, and decision-making by
- Data: The ability to not just capture the data but also retrieve meaningful full data from it, which can be used to influence the customers, is a big game changer.
- Automation: Automation combined with metrics means that consumer behaviour is being tracked, it can be addressed without necessarily requiring a human to supervise the activity, which helps in increasing the proactivity.
- Interaction: Interaction with customers at each level by giving them choices. This will help in influencing the customer to move to the next level closer to the purchase.
- Personalisation: Due to the combination of metrics and interactivity, it’s now possible to track the actions and behaviour of customers at an individual level, and then take that data to provide a personalized marketing response.
Other major influencer tools and platforms utilized by marketing teams:
AI & ML
With AI & ML Marketers are able to build and manage real-time brand reputation. With social listening in place to capture and understand customer voices and crawlers being used to track social chatter, there are whole new automated actionable insights that are being created along with machine learning algorithms.
Social media
Social media which happens to be one of the most powerful tools of marketers today is being effectively used for engaging the community and building followership to establish a connection with the influencers in their niche. Social media, which initially started with just posting ads and then moved to content posting is now a platform for putting out interactive and actionable information and tracking customer reactions. The content is then changed on a real-time basis and re-shared for better attention and meaningful or fruitful actions.
Videos
Videos are again a very strong and powerful tool that can influence customers to stay loyal to specific brands. Identifying the trend and moving the brands with it through influential videos greatly help.
Today’s Marketing efforts and marketers are understanding that curated, personalised, and interactive bite-sized content is the only way forward. Digital transformation paves the way for combining the power of social analytics, digital listening and sentiment analysis which forms the top priority to deliver business beneficial results.
(The author is Mr. Abhijeet Mukherjee, Head of Marketing, Crayon Software Experts India and the views expressed in this article are his own)
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