How To Leverage Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage

Originally published by Marc Emmer for Forbes.

Amid all the news around digital transformation, many businesspeople are figuring out how to apply it to their work environment. Digital transformation is coming in many forms, from online payments to workforce automation. But, there is no other business function being transformed as radically and quickly as sales and marketing.

As a strategy consultant, I often say I love peanut butter, but not as it relates to business strategy. Attempting to spread marketing and sales resources across many markets only dilutes the message. In strategy, we try to isolate markets where we think we can achieve a competitive advantage and then disproportionately concentrate our effort in those markets.

We are undergoing a sea change where marketers are recognizing the need for better targeting. It’s not only a race for who has the best products and services but also for who can convert at the lowest acquisition cost per revenue dollar.

Digital promotes more new entrants and new competition that crowds markets. It’s for this reason that we should think of digital transformation as hyper-specialization. We now have access to tools that allow us to identify the best customers and deliver targeted content based on their needs.

To fully leverage digital transformation in business development, follow these steps.

Conduct a market analysis to identify the best segments.

Unless you are multinational with market power, identify finite segments where you can achieve market leadership. The smaller your company, the more niche you need to be. Analyze the market segments you could serve, and estimate the market size and growth rate.

Ideally, providers quantify their “addressable market” as the overall marketplace they could serve and then reduce it to a more practical “serviceable market,” given their resource or geographic constraints.

Track the customer journey.

The customer journey is only becoming more complex. Today, the savvy marketer tracks the movements of prospects. Before customers interact with a human, we know from which website they came, what type of device they are using and what whitepapers they downloaded.

This information should be at the fingertips of a salesperson (within their customer relationship management system) and may even inform on which salesperson should get the lead. For example, if the prospect is an engineer, they may get assigned to a technical sales representative.

Create specialized landing pages.

Marketers can improve website performance by building landing pages for each specialty. For some companies, that might be market verticals; for others, product pages or practice areas. If you are a provider of managed IT services and your firm has specialized knowledge of colleges and universities, you might have an education landing page where you provide examples of whitepapers, case studies and testimonials about education. This will drive better search engine optimization.

Deliver curated content.

Marketers, armed with the knowledge of exactly what a prospect is looking for, can send specific content, offers and promotions to solicit a response. Drip campaigns and web pages provide thought leadership on topics relevant to the buyer and create more targeted calls to action to move the client through the funnel. Studies have revealed that?more than 70%?of the buying decision is made outside the interaction with a salesperson.

Organize sales and marketing in swim lanes.?

Sales and marketing used to work independently of one another. Today, it’s critical that there is a high level of integration between the two functions. As companies become more specialized, they are organizing into “swim lanes.”

In many industries, sales teams are migrating from organizing around geography toward areas of specialty (in this case, a market vertical such as healthcare). Marketing supports the niche with trade marketing tools. For example, a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system could be prepopulated with various email templates that salespeople can use pre-call or post-call.

Leverage AI.

Soon, artificial intelligence and machine learning will dominate these activities. Many current tools allow you to search for contact information and create targeted drip campaigns to serve each segment. By A/B testing various messages and calls to action, marketers can identify which activations work.

Leverage improved marketing ROI.

Those who execute these principles will convert at a higher rate than those who are slow to adapt. Improved return on marketing investment (ROMI) will result in more money to spend, achieving better results and ultimately competitive advantage.