Thanks for joining me for this third instalment of our series on the six stages of digital transformation.
Throughout the series, we’ve been examining the six distinct steps—from “Business as Usual” to digitally “Innovative and Adaptive”—as laid out in the 2016 Altimeter Study “The Six Stages of Digital Transformation.”
We began by looking at the transition from “Business as Usual” to “Present and Active,” as certain teams within companies recognise that old paradigms are no longer effective, and begin to conduct small, isolated experiments in digital-first outreach. Then, in the second article, we took a closer look at the “Formalised” stage, in which digital experimentation becomes more directed as marketing departments seek to build holistic customer profiles, and to integrate functions from hosting to analytics into a single marketing platform.
As more departments within the organisation become aware of the successes to be gained by attaining digital literacy, these teams may recognise that even more powerful insights can be gained by collaborating with one another. Driven by digital-first training and active empowerment from the executive level, the company may then embark on the “Strategic” stage of digital transformation, in which digital efforts are formally organised according to a consistent roadmap.
Content marketing
By this stage of digital transformation, experts on several teams have achieved increasing conversion rates on a variety of digital channels, including mobile and social. The leadership—and the customers—are now asking for more. Expectations of real-time responsiveness and continuous, consistent interactions across all channels create the need to increase content velocity, to create a seamless omnichannel customer experience, and to measure the impact of content throughout the entire customer journey, across all touchpoints.
Publisher Thomson Reuters, for example, already had all the pieces in place to deliver rich digital experiences to customers. The company had compelling content, an easy-to-navigate website, and mobile and social properties that accurately reflected the brand’s voice. What it was missing, however, was a system for tying together data from each of these channels to make data-driven decisions on cross-channel content strategy.
By integrating a wide variety of testing, analytics, and personalisation tools, Thomson Reuters was able not only to deliver custom content and e-commerce experiences on demand, but to proactively anticipate search trends, in order to greet customers with fresh content tailored around their interests, delivered consistently across all channels. The results were a 50 percent conversion lift in e-commerce transactions, a 200 percent boost in reader retention, and an established cycle of best practices for testing and optimising content, navigation, and layout to improve customer experiences even further.
But some digital marketers go even further than this. They want not only to deliver impactful cross-channel content in real time, but also to find out precisely which pieces of content are driving conversions on which channels—and why.
Marketing attribution
Now that advertising has become a central aspect of the customer experience, some marketers may begin to worry that they’re not getting the best results possible. They may question whether they truly understand why certain content and tactics lead to certain results, and whether different channels may be impacting each other’s results in ways they can’t see clearly. Marketers who can pinpoint inaccurate or misleading information can help significantly increase the value of each marketing investment, and maximise reach and impact for each media purchase.
Leading PC manufacturer Lenovo established a Global Business Intelligence team to harness customer data for more effective marketing. After early successes with integrated content marketing, stakeholders and marketers alike began to ask if seemingly small content tweaks and optimisations could lead to significant lifts in conversion.
By analysing data combined from six sources—including web, post-purchase survey, CRM,
call centre, email, and live chat—the Lenovo team built its own predictive segmentation scoring model, which enabled them to calculate, in real time, the likelihood that a given visitor would make a purchase via a given channel when presented with a given message and content structure. This enabled the company to tailor its online content more precisely than ever before, creating a 12-fold return on investment (ROI) in only six months, a 495 percent lift in optimised content, and a 26 percent improvement in global sales—all because of many tiny changes in content.
Empowered by attributable click-throughs, guided by data-driven content strategies, marketers may seek to use these insights in prescriptive ways, to build forward-looking roadmaps for campaign development and deployment.
Campaign orchestration
Once marketers have seen the impact of dynamically adaptive content, the next logical step is to automate the optimisation process, and launch entire campaigns in which consistent messaging and presentation are iteratively improved and utilised for maximum cross-channel impact. Hence, the need for campaign orchestration—the centralised creation, automation, and orchestration of consistent omnichannel campaigns, in which each piece of content hits the customer with exactly the right message at precisely the right time.
UBS, the financial services organisation headquarterd in Zurich, Switzerland, already had a world-class website, offering 50,000 pages in multiple languages, highlighting financial news, blogs, digital marketing offers, videos, and details about the bank’s credit cards, mortgages, and other offerings. The company’s intranet also pushed out more than 100,000 pages of information to employees. This enormous traffic volume gave UBS the opportunity to serve highly targeted content to both external and internal users—but the bank’s existing web content management system made updates and automation cumbersome.
UBS adopted a centralised analytics and content delivery solution that enabled the company to track sites and assets, generate marketing reports and perform A/B tests on the fly, and dynamically surface content from its enormous library according to the needs and attributes of each visitor. The platform’s built-in analytics automatically track and attribute click-throughs, driving higher-quality digital experiences that measurably boost conversions. The system also streamlines the updating process with shared templates and assets, and provides an unparalleled range of insights on customer activities and communications across all digital channels.
Once a company has reached this “Strategic” stage of digital transformation, data silos are a thing of the past, and teams are actively sharing data and insights across campaigns and departments. As those teams collaborate on new strategic roadmaps, digital-first thinking begins to impact the company’s investment choices, as well as plans for future strategic initiatives.
Few companies have progressed beyond this stage of digital transformation. In the rarefied organisations that push onward into the “Converged” stage, digital strategy begins to shape
not only marketing research and tactics, but the fundamental infrastructure of the organisation as a whole. It’s with this stage—and the final “Innovative and Adaptive” stage—that we’ll cover as we conclude this series in the next and final article. See you there!
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