DIGITAL : DIGEST IT ALL - Digital Innovations and Digital Transformations

Look at current state of digital transformation across six key industries – Retail, Banking, Healthcare, Insurance, Telco, Media, etc.

In today's business landscape, with industries being disrupted at every turn, companies must be able to quickly change their products and processes to pivot to take advantage of new market opportunities.

Improving digital maturity will be key to meeting the changing needs of customers in an evolving marketplace. Some industries, like financial services, have made digital innovation a priority and are better equipped to handle industry disruption, while others, most notably insurance and healthcare, are comprised of organizations still struggling to establish long-term strategies. Companies that are obsessed with the experience they provide to their customers, can achieve significant operational efficiencies, and put innovation at the heart of their respective cultures are the ones that will see the greatest benefits from digital transformation.

The following are some additional interesting insights:

■ Retail outperforms other industries and is setting the standard for creating innovative, digitally-driven customer experiences.

■ Banking firms are ease-of-use leaders, yet they face investment challenges, including slow economic growth, low interest margins, increased regulation, and changing consumer expectations.

■ Healthcare companies traditionally lag behind other industries in adopting business technologies that help with customer engagement. This is tied to intense regulatory requirements leading to a significant focus on security of customer data.

■ Insurance organizations are just beginning to digitally transform as the complexity of products and services, legacy technology reliance, and risk-averse cultures all affect how fast insurers can move forward with their digital transformation journeys.

■ Telco firms are shifting to customer-centricity, driven in part by low customer satisfaction and disruption caused by over-the-top (OTT) providers.

■ Media companies have the most ground to cover in digital transformation. They also represent the group least likely to increase investment in digital initiatives.

In the digital marketing context, a lot of what AI is doing is meta-analysis of broad-spectrum data sets and then using that data to make its own decisions.

While the technology is still in its infancy, we’re already seeing some pretty major examples of this in the day-to-day world. Self-driving cars are already being sold, for instance. And both Amazon and Netflix already have built-in AI features that help with recommendations and transactions. We’ll continue to see it being used in a range of up-and-coming marketing applications, including content creation, voice and face recognition, chatbots, digital assistants, and highly targeted marketing strategies.

AI will become the norm in terms of marketing strategy because of its increasingly accurate ability to analyze consumer behavior and feed into a better, more interactive and personalized purchasing experience.

The biggest challenge across all industries is that most organizations are treating digital transformation as a loose correlation of technology projects. Yet digital transformation is not a project; it is a re-writing of the business and requires significant cultural change.

Digital transformation is about streamlining the customer experience(CX), optimizing operations (OO) and thinking differently about innovation. It's not about the ROI of a single digital program, but rather survival in your respective industry.

More people are spending more time on social platforms, but the way we are using them is shifting. For instance, we’re watching more videos and other media than specifically using them for “social” reasons. Users are looking more towards entertainment and new technology like virtual reality and are seeking ways to do this separately from their socializing. Social media leaders and up and comers are separating these two areas, and Facebook is also introducing a new newsfeed option (“Explore”) that separates social feed and ads.

In addition, personal blogs and websites are becoming less popular as a means of interacting online, and fewer people are using instant messaging. This means that digital marketers need to keep an eye on the (shifting) ways that social media platforms are choosing to incorporate explicit advertising strategies, as well as understanding new ways to collect customer information implicitly to direct their strategy.

Blockchain is a hot topic these days, and it’s one that’s not about to go away. It refers to a decentralized digital leger that is the basis for anonymous and highly secure applications. It’s also unregulated, which makes it not a great idea to immerse in now on a business level, but understanding the possible business opportunities here is important as it develops.

In a business context, this type of technology could serve to be an extremely effective way of preventing fraud and ensuring security with customer transactions across almost any industry. In this, it could be used for brand building and customer loyalty programs, for instance, especially in B2B when frequent and large transactions may be the norm.

All digital marketers need to stay on top of the trends listed above to ensure that their marketing strategy is staying competitive. Marketers will need to have a clear vision and goals and keep a somewhat flexible longer-term strategy to incorporate some of these trends. They always need to be thinking, learning, and testing in order to accommodate new technology as it becomes increasingly affordable and accessible.

In short, there is a growing culture of innovation and a rising awareness of the need to review organisational roles, competences and processes, with a view to improving the ability to seize opportunities for innovation, absorb knowledge from without, and increase the engagement of top management in various business areas. 

Managing digital innovation effectively means rethinking organisations as a whole, from the structure through to processes and coordination mechanisms. Despite being often tied down by organisational and cultural inertia, and blocked by slow, burdensome operational models, companies are actively working towards this transformation. 

Digital innovation is now essential for businesses who are looking to stay ahead of the competition, and win the heart of the consumer.