Digital Transformation Part 4- Creating Value in Marketing

In the "Digital Transformation: Lessons Learned on the Way to Value" interview series, Digital Strategy and Business Transformation experts Don Mishory and Jim MacLennan discuss a simplified Digital Transformation framework for defining and realizing value across your business. In Part 4, Don & Jim answer this question: How does Digital Transformation create value in marketing?

Transcript

Don Mishory: One of the value metrics I know you’ve talked about is revenue and lead generation. What about digital in the context of marketing? What are some of the things that you’re seeing and you think are important as we talk about digital marketing?

Jim MacLennan: Well, once again going back to my framework, I think digital marketing has a huge impact believe it or not on products. I always feel that if you want to drive true innovation and true organic growth, topline growth, you’ve got to get that voice of the customer. You have got to understand what the customers want. And digital marketing takes a nice broad view of what that means. There’s a lot of ability to get a ton of great information from your customers, figure out what they want and give it to them. Then low and behold there’s a lot of organic growth.

Yes, you can do outbound marketing and you can do outbound sell and you can use the tools to find out what part of your message is working and what part of your message is not but to me that’s more focused on a transaction. Valuable stuff, but I think the kind of digital marketing that also feeds into your product design and helps you listen to your customers, that’s really transformative stuff.

Don: One of the things we’ve learned around digital marketing is you know we all use the term customer right? Who’s your customer? If you’re a bank, is your customer the individual account holders or is your customer the corporation they work for? Being able to associate human profiles or corporate profiles with familial relationships is a really important part of digital marketing. We’re seeing a lot more focus on that data part as well and I’m assuming you’re seeing that too.

Jim: Absolutely. You can think of the whole value chain from manufacturing through a distribution channel, so there’s a lot of influencers right there, and then to the actual consumer of the end product. A lot of businesses go through distribution but then, to your point, all those influencers [along the way]. It used to be really complicated and hard to keep track of [all those influencers] but the really good digital tools, actually most digital tools right now, allow you to see that much bigger picture of not only the actual consumer of your product but the people that buy it and pay for it and get it in the distribution channel. And the people that influence the decision, all that stuff. So yeah, [digital transformation is an] incredibly important piece, to drive organic growth.