Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword; it has dawned on most organizations that it’s not just deploying some new technologies; it borders on the culture of the organization, the employees, supply chains, contractors, and stakeholders. It must be focused on how to give consumers a better experience, and for an ideology, 77.3% of Fortune 500 CIOs decided to prioritize in their budgets, it can never be business as usual.

Digital transformation is about the survival of an organization, it has to do with being relevant and staying competitive. A successful digital transformation works on a well-planned strategy; it must focus on which legacy systems need to be revamped, which tasks need to be outsourced for better performance, and which must be defined more by business objectives.

The strategy you need can’t just be any strategy; it must be digital.

What is digital strategy?

Digital strategy is a holistic and comprehensive strategic implementation of new digital proficiencies and software systems; it aims at enhancing the optimization of scalability for better performances in business operations and outcomes.

Since you’ll be deploying new technologies to improve your existing business operations, your digital strategy will spell out how you will effectively enhance the supply chain, measures for product fulfillment, ensure collaboration among your employees, steps to improve customer experience, training and re-training, relationship nurturing, and internal alignment and management.

A well-planned digital strategy should include elements such as:

Upgraded and wide-ranging cloud-based services

Apart from digital transformation, the next thing CIOs saw fit to focus attention on their budgets is cybersecurity, as 75% of them said that is their second top priority. Any digital transformation initiative has to go with new technologies.

This is an avenue for cybercriminals to operate; if you don’t have a program to mitigate cyberattacks and breaches in your digital strategy, you are still at zero levels. Cloud-based services ensure that you have the capabilities for virtualization, multi-tenancy, network access, elasticity, and metering/chargeback.

With cloud-based services, you can be certain of faster implementation and time to value, as well as enhanced security and protection of information assets. It also becomes easier for you to rapidly scale to meet up with demand, you have lower infrastructural needs, energy, and facility costs.

Data-enabled sentiment analysis for improved prediction of individual customer behavior

Your digital strategy should enable you to predict what your customers will want to do in the nearest future; you need means of accessing and analyzing their data. Incidentally, sentiment analysis will enable you to analyze and interpret any text with automation.

Algorithms that are now based on machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and text analytics can decipher sentiments from large volumes of data, and classify your customers’ statements as positive, negative, and neutral. From product review data, you have all the relevant information of consumers’ likes, dislikes, pain points, and overall feelings about your brand.

You also gain veritable insights into how you are faring with the competition. The consumer insights you get from product data review and your sentiment analysis of customers’ feelings enable you to know how to embark on digital transformation.

You have a clear picture of the areas you need to work seriously on, the apps you may need, and what new technologies you must deploy to ensure an improved customer experience.

Web analytics

Any organization that does not have a website, in this era, is not really into business. Your website is more or less your store. When customers search online for products and services, your website is their point of call.

You use web analytics to analyze the behavior of visitors to your website. You can measure your web activity through tracking, reviewing, and reporting data.

How do visitors use components such as webpages, images, and videos as well as the website? By compiling this data, you can build customer relationship management (CRM analytics) to enhance better digital transformation initiatives.

Having web analytics in your digital strategy is an opportunity for you to better understand your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. Your ability to identify KPIs is enhanced by web analytics, and you can then go on to measure, monitor, and analyze user behavior such as bounce rates, churn, customer life history, unique users, user sessions, and on-site search queries on your website.

Why do you need a digital strategy for your digital transformation initiatives?

When you have a digital strategy in place, you have a blueprint and a roadmap of what you want to achieve and how to achieve it. It’s a guide, and these are some of the benefits you derive from digital strategy:

Meeting up with customers’ expectations

Customers now call the shots; it’s either you do what they want or your business collapses. Digital transformation has become the only channel to ensure an improved customer experience; it’s now the standard for successful business strategy and organizational alignment.

There is a great disruption in the business world and to fit in and remain relevant, you need a comprehensive and robust digital strategy. There is absolutely no way you can successfully embark on digital transformation without a digital strategy; there will be challenges you did not plan for and won’t know how to circumvent.

A digital strategy ensures that employees, management, stakeholders, the supply chain, contractors, and other third parties focus on how to address customers’ pain points using customer journey mapping.

Eliminate downtime

There will be the need to take drastic decisions; you may need to train and even re-train some employees to fit into specific roles along the transformation journey. This may be hard on the employees, and you may have to face some pockets of resistance.

A digital strategy ensures that you know what to do. You can’t afford to cut corners, you must have planned for this in your digital strategy, you should have come up with possible solutions to such scenarios.

If the necessary changes are not effected, you are only putting off the day for the inevitable to happen. You are just buying time for a potentially irreversible market disadvantage.

Smooth-running internal operations

A digital strategy ensures that specific tasks are assigned to the right department. There is, however, the opportunity to collaborate and cross-communicate, since you are looking at deploying new technologies and software tools.

You don’t need internal bloat, and this can only be ensured with the right training and optimized onboarding system. The ability to use software seamlessly and constructively ensures smooth-running of internal operations, you don’t require figuring out how to use a particular technology, and this goes a long way in enhancing productivity, boosting employees’ morale, and improving customer experience.

Conclusion

Customers expect the best, if you don’t have a good digital strategy, they will notice. They have the access and connectivity to find out what the competition is doing differently.

Apart from satisfying customers, your digital strategy ensures you cut unnecessary costs since you have a focus. It’s the era of big data, and when you correctly apply data to your digital strategy, you have access to valuable metrics.

A digital transformation is an innovative move and is, therefore, data-based.

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