Why Digital Transformation is Essential for Business Growth

Digital transformation is key for business growth. By investing into digital transformation you are enabling your business to improve efficiency, reach new markets and empower your brand and business to embrace growth culture. 

WHAT IS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION?

Digital transformation is the response to the ever-changing and ever-growing market and is the process of ensuring your business practices match up and compete with current trends. This most likely means a business adding new practices or amending the existing ones to digitally compete. 

Digital transformation offers benefits such as delivering a better customer experience (increasing conversion and retention rates), provide better information for data-driven decision making, improves organisational agility, and, improves employee collaboration.  In a world that is changing rapidly, businesses that have these tools at their disposal can build a distinct competitive advantage.

HOW DO I START DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION?

To get started you need a clear understanding of your current business processes. Without understanding how they are currently working, you won't be able to identify the opportunities for change. Involve the people that do the process in the decisions, what problems do they face in the day-to-day? What parts of their roles are the most difficult? Do they have any ideas to boost efficiency? Hearing from those who will be immediately impacted with the changes is a great way to boost and improve employee collaboration. You want to create a culture of growth within the business, so by involving the employees it gives a great opportunity to demonstrate the importance of change and to understand the benefits to the business as well as themselves. Whilst digital transformation ultimately is advancing the business as a whole, the day-to-day improvements for the individual are just as important to consider.

Once you have an understanding of the process, you then need to forget it! Now we are reimagining the process, start with a blank piece of paper and consider the start and end points, what is the best way to complete that journey? What would that process look like at its most ideal and optimised form? Use your data to influence your decision making. For example, if you see a large percentage of prospects disconnecting at the same point, consider what you could implement to help improve that. Once settled on the most optimised form, you can then apply that thinking to the current process. Don't be scared to try new things, some issues will more than likely occur, but you can learn from that and grow further. 

BENEFITS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

In the modern world, customers expect a certain experience and level of service. If a business isn't delivering they can easily move to another that does meet that demand. Ensure a quality interaction with your business by providing an optimised digital experience. This could be by building a better website experience using personalised content or by making it easy to contact you via forms, chatbots, tracked phone numbers, WhatsApp integrations, etc. By creating a better user experience you will nurture new leads which will convert to prospects and then to customers. 

ORGANISATION AGILITY

By implementing digital transformation you begin to streamline your business practices. For example, implement automation to help efficiency. Automated processes can be used to take out much of the admin required to keep a sales pipeline up-to-date. Investing in a CRM such as HubSpot would be ideal for streamlining and automating the sales process. This then allows more time for your sales team to actually sell! It also helps your business to be more adaptive and flexible with your approach, and be able to make decisions to react to changes on demand. 

GROWTH CULTURE

Be regarded as a leader in your field and develop a growth culture. Set the bar for the digital experience for the customers in your industry and develop a work place culture that embraces and thrives in change. Develop a strategy for implementing change via communication, demos, forums etc. and encourage a growth culture internally. As you transform, as will your brand and become known for your growth culture and digital innovation. 

INCREASED REVENUE

The main benefit, and what all the other benefits drive towards, is an increase in revenue. Boston Consulting Group report a business implementing digital transformation is 26% more likely to increase their revenue when compared to industry averages. Digital transformation focuses on improving your business so whether it improves the customer journey, helping to gain new and retain customers, or whether automation is implemented to help streamline the sales journey and save time in the administration process, you are going to see the benefits on your bottom line.

WHY DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS ESSENTIAL FOR BUSINESS GROWTH?

Digital transformation is an essential for business growth, develop your business to have a growth culture and to embrace change, improve your customer journey and streamline your business practices. All of these will ultimately help boost your profits. Change can be intimidating but by implementing a digital transform strategy and having the right people in place ready to embrace the innovations, you will be in a great position to grow your business and become a leader in your field.

Interested in getting started with digital transformation and implementing a growth strategy? Our eBook "Building a Business Growth Engine" is a great place to start...