what is digital transformation
What is digital transformation, and what is digital maturity?
Digital transformation is the continuous journey by which a company, with the right initiatives, becomes more digitally mature. To be successful, the organization must have a clear vision about the transformation process and a mindset that the journey has no end point.
Digitalization is an ongoing process towards a higher maturity level in order to stay in pace with society, consumers, and competitors.
Digital maturity can be defined as a specific stage during this journey. As technology is constantly evolving, there is no specific goal for the journey and likewise no specific industry benchmark or scale that you can measure yourself against.
As there is no industry standard for digital maturity, each company has unique needs in terms of digital development and has its own unique challenges.
Therefore, an industry benchmark would be close to meaningless in any larger sense than as a vanity metric.
What you can do instead is to develop a digital transformation strategy where you benchmark against yourself in areas such as knowledge, processes and platforms on a by department level.
By evaluating the digital maturity of your company through a deep understanding of what potential your organization has, what your organization sees as important in the market and so on, you will know which parts of your company you need to focus on to move your digital initiatives forward.
A digital transformation strategy for the marketing function
Many functions in a company have already gone through major changes in terms of digitalization. Logistics, production, sales, and finance have, in most companies, become digitalized to a very high degree. But the marketing function is still lagging behind in relation to what's possible today.
The Digital Maturity Barometer takes the temperature of your marketing activities and shows you which parts you need to focus on.
In a broader perspective, the Digital Maturity Barometer evaluates three areas – knowledge, processes, and platforms. If your employees do not have the right knowledge, you will not succeed no matter how state-of-the art digital platforms you have. If you do not have efficient processes in place, your digital marketing activities will not work, even if you have people with the right knowledge. And so on.
KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge about digital marketing – multichannel marketing, Inbound Marketing, social media, and so forth – among your employees is one of the most important prerequisites for your digital transformation strategy to succeed.
PROCESSES
Having efficient processes in place is a fundamental part of digital transformation. Marketing has become more complex and no matter what industry you belong to, you will need to have a multichannel marketing approach.
PLATFORMS
On top of the agenda for many companies is to generate leads. To be able to work with leads generation you need the right platforms, so that you can follow your leads and how they interact with your website and other channels to finally make a purchase or contact you.