COVID19 Will Be Seen As THE Single Biggest Driver Of Digital Transformation EVER

Digital Data Map for COVID19

Digital is helping businesses transform themselves in an ever-changing landscape across the four key pillars of their organisation. The key is to accelerate these changes within your business in order that you are agile, responsive and come out stronger post the crisis:

1. Strategy and brand — leverage digital listening tools, distribute CRM communications and conduct sentiment analysis on social media to get a feel of how your customers are reacting to what is going on and where they think you can support them. I’ve written recently about how emotions are key for businesses to understand especially now. Check that out for more information here.
2. Crisis and response — leverage digital touchpoints to notify your workforce, partner ecosystem and customers. How are you using your website, app, social channels? How can you respond quickly to news updates such as the daily government briefing and where is it best to communicate what information at what time? Make sure that you update your search strategy so that if your customers are typing queries into Google your business, service, solution is still relevant.
3. Employees — in order to mitigate the impact of the pandemic to your company it is imperative you look at how you can firstly ensure connection and community across your workforce. How can you use digital tools to communicate? How can you host virtual meetings? Collaborate on key documents and digitise workflows? Ensure that you are able to train and upskill your entire staff base to your (new) virtual working and online processes.
4. Commerce — now this is obviously the big one and I’ll be writing a more in-depth article on this and what changes I’ve noticed over the past 4 weeks since the situation became serious in the UK. However, in brief, digital customer engagement strategies are moving to webinars and social. Selling has moved to virtual meetings, phone calls, direct mail, eCommerce and email. Social media will play a larger role as buyers spend more time on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn during more flexible working hours. It’s time to reinvent the customer journey and engage buyers where they are when they’re online. This means connecting with them out of the normal schedule.

I really believe that if you weave digital strategy and transformation into your new business strategies moving forward that you can protect your business, your pipeline and revenue in 2020 and not get left behind. You never know you might even come up with new ways of making revenue through providing digital access through mobile, social or your website to your customers.

As always I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, feedback and experiences in the comments section below.