In today’s fast-paced world, businesses face a perfect storm: rising customer expectations, talent shortages, and economic turbulence. The playing field isn’t level – while legacy organizations struggle to adapt, nimble start-ups are leveraging cutting-edge tech to disrupt industries. For established players, digital transformation isn’t just an option – it’s a lifeline.
However, even with the most detailed roadmaps and the best intentions, business transformation is not a guaranteed success. In fact, around 70% of these projects fail to deliver positive results – something that has already cost over $2.3 trillion globally. Early buy-in is crucial, but difficult to achieve when stakeholders do not see tangible results in the initial phases of a project.
Therefore, those looking to undertake transformation projects need to look for technologies and techniques that will enable them to achieve long-term ambitions as well as the first quick wins. This could generate more excitement around the transformation – both internally and externally – and ultimately help to prevent future failure.
Group Chief Strategy Officer, UK&I, at dentsu.
Marketing Tech: The Game Changer for Business Transformation
Business leaders are often under heavy scrutiny when it comes to justifying investment in marketing technologies, even those that help businesses to better understand their customers. Advocating for buy-in internally can be tricky, with some stakeholders incorrectly viewing marketing as a cost burden rather than a revenue generator. However, this antiquated way of thinking is not in line with today’s reality.
Just as marketing has become a key driver of business strategy, marketing technologies are emerging as a crucial component of business transformation. The data and insights provided by next-gen marketing tools alongside techniques such as market landscaping are enabling businesses to map out long-term goals as well as effectively respond to immediate market shifts.
Why Data is the Cornerstone of Transformation
No good decision is made without data. Every business operating in today’s digital world knows its value. However, despite this, recent research discovered that only half (51%) of businesses believe that they have their data set up in a way that enables them to make the most of their customer insights.
In today’s landscape margins are tight and mistakes are costly. Knowing your audience inside-out could be the difference between a transformation that soars and one that stumbles. This is why human-led data-driven insights should be the guiding force behind any business transformation.
Often, marketing teams are light years ahead when to comes to using such insights. This is because their success depends on knowing exactly what makes customers tick. After all, a campaign’s success is reliant on understanding the people it is trying to reach. The data-driven insights into human behavior already being used by marketing can inform wider business transformation strategy and help businesses to predict future trends, strategize more effectively, and be more proactive in catering to their audience’s needs.
Imagine a global fashion retailer struggling to stay competitive in a rapidly shifting market. By leveraging marketing data, the company identifies that a growing segment of its audience is prioritizing sustainable and ethically sourced products. Marketing teams can use these insights to craft highly targeted campaigns that emphasize the brand’s eco-friendly practices and new sustainable product lines.
But the data’s impact doesn’t stop there. These same insights can spark a broader business transformation: it can be the catalyst for restructuring the organization’s supply chain to align with sustainability demands, introducing a recycling program, and offering greater transparency on material sourcing. As a result, not only will customer loyalty surge, but the retailer will also capture a new, eco-conscious audience, doubling its revenue in this category within two years.
Building Agility Through Marketing Tech: Strategies for Success
Markets are volatile and what’s relevant today might not be tomorrow. Businesses should adopt an approach of ‘agile resilience’ to be better prepared for whatever comes next. This means designing flexible frameworks that will allow for recalibration as new data and insights emerge, staying aligned with long-term objectives, while still being able to respond to immediate shifts.
By integrating marketing technologies like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), with artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, business leaders can analyze in real-time, and predict future, structured and unstructured data at scale. These tools make it easier than ever to pre-empt consumer behavioral changes and plan for where, when, and what shoppers will spend money on. This enables business leaders to become scenario planners, anticipating market shifts and pre-empting competitors’ next moves, to create business transformation strategies that are directional, but also agile.
Similarly, through scenario planning and market landscaping, businesses can be ready to react if competitors move into new markets and spaces. A dynamic market view not only sets a strong foundation for future campaigns, but it also sustains momentum in transformation initiatives. For instance, scenario planning can feed into a future-back approach, starting with a clear vision of what the business needs to become in the long run and then defining the tangible steps required to get there. This keeps every transformation initiative aligned with the end goal, even as market conditions shift.
As new technologies emerge, so do new ways to track success. Leaders undertaking business transformation projects should remain inquisitive and look beyond traditional metrics. For example, the attribution models traditionally used by marketers can be utilized to track which channels are proving most effective or carry out churn analysis. It’s even possible to incorporate real-time information – such as weather patterns and geopolitical data – into these models, to build a more holistic view. For example, an ice cream brand might choose to incorporate data on weather patterns. This would enable them to predict where and when the next spike in demand would be and ensure that stock and marketing materials can be proactively directed to the right places at the right time.
Ensure all decisions are data-driven
There is no doubt that change is on the horizon – and business transformation projects are set to feature heavily for businesses of all shapes and sizes moving forward -with almost 2 in 3 businesses believing that at least half of their future revenue will come from offerings that are not yet in their portfolio.
However, it’s important to recognize that business transformation is an ongoing process. It is a journey, in which businesses strive to better understand their audience’s needs, rather than the final destination. The future belongs to businesses that dare to evolve. By marrying bold vision with agile execution, and letting data lead the way, organizations can unlock a new era of transformation – one that’s as resilient as it is revolutionary.
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