Digital transformation is a term that’s been around for years. So the first question in writing about digital transformation in 2024 is: is it still relevant?
In short, yes it is. Although it’s a well-worn term these days, it’s still a subject we cover with many brands on a regular basis.
And it’s very likely that digital transformation is something you find hard to define, particularly when it comes to how it impacts your marketing.
We pose in this article that digital transformation in marketing involves not just integrating digital technologies and strategies into a business, but recognising when they are still seen as separate and how this could impact many areas of marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the important areas of digital transformation that are very much still relevant — or becoming relevant in 2024.
Are we past digital transformation?
While digital transformation has been a buzzword for years now, the answer is mostly no.
Many organisations have made significant strides in adopting digital technologies, and certainly within advertising channels it would be surprising to learn of a brand that hadn’t tried out for example social media — paid or not.
Digital transformation is a continuous process that requires ongoing adaptation and innovation, but it now should also require the acknowledgement that digital and ‘non-digital’ are essentially the same thing.
As an agency we aim to create brands with strategy and purpose, and often we see the same issues with adoption of digital when we are analysing brands. This article covers some areas that hopefully will get you thinking about your own organisation and its adoption of digital.
We’re not going to cover which emerging technologies (such as AI, AR) in this post as you may expect. Here we want to look at examples that pertain to marketing, and ultimately how they could help to resonate with and retain customers for meaningful growth.
Digital transformation in marketing strategy
In his book This is Marketing, Seth Godin makes the distinction between traditional (brand) marketing and digital marketing as being separate things, and traditional marketing being almost impossible to measure, whilst digital marketing is completely measurable.
And truthfully this is how most organisations still split their tactics.
But traditional marketing has a huge influence on digital, and visa-versa, and this is where most brands go wrong.
Back to basics
When considering marketing strategy it’s very common to see large organisations who aren’t considering the basics.
We’re talking strategy here not tactics.
Let’s say you have a team writing content, internal or external. Do they know your mission and vision? Do they know your values? Do they know your position in the market? Have you given them a company wide tone of voice?
We’re big on brand at Woven because we know the consistency of messaging in marketing is extremely important. Campaigns come and go, their creative changes, but successful companies know the message behind them stays the same. And this aligns with mission and vision.
Too often organisations fail to communicate effectively with their various tactical teams. The basics of marketing strategy haven’t really changed for a very long time, and for good reason – they are a solid foundation.
Channels like Google Ads make it very easy for you to push new creative changes live, and that can lead to a disconnection from strategy. If you have marketing teams doing tactical work for you – make sure it’s aligned with your overall strategy. This is especially true of tactics that come from digital transformation.
Digital team, marketing team
And on the subject of teams, budgets are often allocated on a channel basis, with larger organisations having a separate team or function for each. Which makes sense if we are able to accurately measure each channel, but not so much if we are considering the less tangible aspects of marketing.
New and growing companies will generally be resource tight, and spend marketing budget on perhaps only one or two channels, such as Meta or Google Ads. And this makes sense for them whilst they test and learn, then over time grow and adopt new channels.
But if you are a larger brand with many moving parts, it becomes easy to separate them out, which leads to teams that often don’t communicate effectively, and certainly stray from your overall strategy.
At Woven we ensure that our work across multiple channels considers all as a whole. We recommend regular strategic alignment meetings across all teams including brand, web, activations and digital. And we encourage a reporting model that doesn’t isolate channels too.
Reporting in a digital world
For brands that have adopted digital technologies, we have more data on our marketing and company performance than ever before.
This can feel like a good thing. But there’s a fallacy here: more often than not, individual channels will have their own reports, and decisions will be made based off those individual channel reports. It’s a simple method of reporting.
But we know that customer journeys are very far from simple.
Let’s take a medium-level customer decision journey as an example: buying a TV. What typical considerations and steps would be involved in someone purchasing a new TV?
- They identify they need a new TV
- They Google search ‘best TVs’
- They read a few articles from tech websites and start to identify trustworthy brands
- They go about their lives and perhaps speak to a friend who knows a little more about technology
- They are browsing the web during a work day and notice a display advertisement for the brand alongside an article
- They notice the brand’s adverting on Instagram
- They’re shopping and notice there’s TVs on offer in a large supermarket
- They’re at home and Google search the TV they’ve been considering
- They click a paid Google Ad from the brand
- They hit the website and purchase the TV
Not only are there multiple steps here, but at each marketing tactic level there’s the opportunity for the competition to step in too, and a multitude of other factors.
So why then do we report on a channel basis and make decisions on a channel basis?
At Woven we use attribution modelling as much as possible, to get a better idea of the interaction between channels. Although it’s not perfect, it often uncovers interesting data about customer touch-points.
Then, we understand what we could be doing better across these joined up customer journeys. Back to the first point, this is where brand strategy often steps in. Are we consistent across our ads? Is the content customers are reading about us in line with our position? Is the content we are creating relevant to the questions they are asking about us?
This is the key missing step in digital adaptation in 2024 — making sure everything is joined up.
Conclusion
If you have adopted digital transformation within your organisation and marketing functions, ensure you are considering the potential gaps in knowledge sharing across teams. Digital transformation is a huge subject and we’ve only covered marketing here – get in touch if you’d like to talk to us about how we can help your organisation with any digital transformation.