Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is the profound transformation of business and organizational activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of a mix of digital technologies and their accelerating impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way, with present and future shifts in mind.
Digital transformation is deployed by converting business into blocks that integrated with customers’ needs and to connect services with third party to cover all users’ demands to buy a product/service.
One of the important issue to focus on Digital Transformation is that technology is now overtaking human roles in many aspects, sooner or later your business needs to be converted to be digitized and transformed into digital services. On the other side, human element is key in it on all levels: in the stages of transformation as such (collaboration, ecosystems, skills, culture, empowerment etc.) and obviously in the goals of digital transformation. Since people don’t want ‘digital’ for everything and do value human and face-to-face interactions there will always be an ‘offline’ element, depending on the context. Yet, also in non-digital interactions and transactions digital transformation plays a role in the sense of empowering any customer-facing agent.
We all know the strength of social media and digital marketing, this strength is resulted as what we called “Network Effect”, this means that any online platform is rated by its own clients, and since we are using social media every single second, then the rest of success any business platform is fully relaying on its client’s feedback, this feedback can be on site, social media, rating …etc. and since we are all connected through social media then this networking will affect the reputation of that platform. Startups need to be extremely careful before they launch their business platform because on today’s life any negative feedback can be widely reached by Network Effect to anyone anywhere, the question is shall those startups be fully-ready before launching their platform, the answer that they need to be ready 100% before launching and reaching audiences at anytime from anywhere.
In the meantime, businesses start to understand that their services should be fully automated through converting business website into online interactive platform, this is nature since we all use technology and visit online platforms every single day, and to compete online these days it is not enough to advertise on social media or on digital marketing channels (i.e. SEO, Google AdWords, Email Marketing ..etc.), any business need fully automated system to run the business online and serve clients immediately, in digital marketing world we called this process “Marketing Automation”.
In Middle East, we still need to work on converting business websites into online platforms which serve clients from anywhere at any time, whether they offer are B2C or B2B products, we need to focus on deploying marketing automation to make our business connected with new leads and clients, and by sending educational contents and promotional campaigns, we will get engaged with more leads and eventually new customers.