As a business leader, you should know that digital transformation is more than just a trend. It is a means to grow and stay ahead of the competition.
45 percent of companies reporting a positive business impact of digital transformation also reported higher net revenue growth.
Likewise, you should also know that going through digital transformation requires a change in organizational culture, business processes, and business models.
Changing the organizational culture to digital culture. Organizational culture is how your company works and operates. It is the beliefs and values of employees. It is the company vision and steps taken to meet that vision, your leadership style, business processes, and more.
Businesses must not forget about the organizational culture when going through a transformation. Ignoring your company culture may risk your business to digital transformation failure.
“When organizations undertake digital transformation and focus only on technology at the expense of culture, that can hinder progress in many areas,” says Carey Oven, a partner with Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory at Deloitte & Touche LLP.
Organizational Culture is Key in Digital Transformation
Business transformation requires redefining organizational mindsets, processes, and talent to prepare for the change. Changing the existing culture of the organization seems to be a lot. As a business leader, you should consider that everyone should be aware of the change and motivated to participate in it.
Executives should organize their culture for digital transformation long before it may become a barrier to the transformation. They should take a step for driving the organization towards a digital culture that is customer-obsessed, empathetic, agile, experimental, and collaborative. As your business goes through digital change, everyone in the company has to consider the change in their roles and responsibilities. As a business leader, you should include your frontline employees while making the decision.
During the transformation process, your business will be moving from traditional culture to digital. Although the journey of cultural shift is not easy, your company will benefit from digital culture.
How to Shift the Organizational Culture to Digital During Digital Transformation
Engage your Employees
The success of business transformation depends on the participation of the people behind it. The transformation brings disruption to the work. First of all, the role of the employee changes. Employees feel disrupted by the change brought by digital tools. People will fear the change if they do not understand the vision and fear that they may face certain risks. And if you guessed it right, they will resist the change. So, engaging the employees in the transformation journey is crucial.
Good communication plays a great role in engaging your employees. Adopting the right digital technologies like Slack will facilitate two-way communication and also collaboration. There are always people in the company behind every success story.
Developing a Leadership Role for the Digital Age
You are shifting your traditional organizational culture to the digital culture. Surely, it is intimidating to embed a new culture in your workplace. And it is even more work when your workforce is diverse and cross-functional. So, in addition to engaged employees, you also need someone with strong leadership skills. In fact, keeping employees engaged requires leadership skills.
As your company moves toward a new culture, a leader needs to set the path for everyone involved. If you are a leader, you need to develop the leadership skills required through the transformation process. Being a leader, you will also need to be tech-savvy to deal with the new array of possible problems.
According to Mckinsey, transformation is successful when business leaders are committed and digital-savvy.
The leaders of the digital age should be open to new ideas, should be able to encourage people to take risks, should be data-driven, and a warrior who leads by example. The leader should create a work environment where people can work in new ways. They should facilitate collaboration and open communication in the company. Additionally, one should also develop a customer-centric, entrepreneurial, and innovative mindset to adapt digitally.
Tools and technology play a part in digital culture
We have been talking all about organizational culture. And digital tools and technologies are just the means to change the business digitally. But your business cannot move towards digital without the means of digital transformation.
Digital culture demands focusing on your customer, engaging your employees through collaboration and communication, and facilitating innovation and data-driven decisions. You should create transparency and let the employees know about the need to change and its benefits to the whole company.
All of these are possible with digital tools and technologies. Collaborative tools like Trello, Slack, or cloud storage technology like Google Drive will surely help your business to move toward digital culture. The key part is that business leaders should use the right tools to drive digital transformation.
Your Business should be Ready for Cultural Change
It all comes down to your business being ready. Changing the existing business culture is never easy. As I mentioned above, there are certain challenges to it. And it depends on leaders like you to steer your business forward and stay ahead of the competition.
In this digital age, the risk of not taking any risk is higher than taking the risk. Does it sound confusing? Let me simplify, you have to take the risk and be ready to face the challenges. Not doing anything is the biggest risk you could take for your business in this modern age. Removing silos in your organization will be another important step. Businesses should focus on developing cross-functional teams who are self-organized and can handle projects independently. One person in the company cannot bring change. The whole company should be ready to move towards digital culture.
Organizations that focus on transforming culture and building capabilities during a transformation are 2.5 times more likely to succeed.
Top Digital Marketing Tools for 2023
If you are a digital marketer looking to boost your marketing strategies and ROI, you will want to know about certain tools that can make things easier. With digital marketing tools, you will be able to execute proper strategies in the right manner. These tools are designed to keep things organized, allowing you to make necessary customizations whenever needed.
After facing the challenges in 2022, we have to focus on creating better and more innovative strategies in 2023. In this post, we share the most influential and creative digital marketing tools you should experiment with and try if you want to outshine your marketing campaigns in 2022.
- MailChimp
MailChimp is a social advertising and email marketing tool designed to orchestrate and automate digital marketing campaigns. It is one of the best digital marketing tools you can get to improve your campaigns and track the traffic generated. Moreover, the platform allows multiple integrations with different SaaS companies. The tool is quite efficient for email campaigns, using which you can engage with your audience. MailChimp is a well-renowned name in the world of email marketing.
The features of MailChimp:
- Creates better content with easy-to-use design tools
- Use AI-powered assistant for generating custom designs.
- Create personalized emails and get up to 6 times more orders using marketing automation
- Provides tools for getting insights and analytics in one place
- Also, provide a free plan for small marketers.
MailChimp incorporates pre-built, customizable email automation that makes it easy for you to reach the right audience at the right moment. The best part is that you can keep your brand top of mind and delight your customers with happy birthday messages, welcome automation, and order notifications.
Online retail and e-commerce businesses can significantly benefit from MailChimp, as it can help you drive traffic, increase conversions, and grow sales.
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful digital marketing tool that can help you with numerous marketing decisions. You can easily track your e-commerce business as well as goals that can help keep your company on track. Using the innumerable data insights that Google Analytics provides, it is easy for marketers to understand the directions required to take with website modifications and changes. All you have to do is install Google Analytics on your site, and you are ready to go.
The features of Google Analytics:
- Provides you with information about traffic on your website that is divided by devices, products, pages, and more.
- Let you create your metrics, dimensions, and dashboard for easy access to data and information.
- Helps you understand your target audience in a better way. You will get real-time updates about your website’s customers, including the pages they are currently exploring. This can help you make your landing page more engaging by providing the customers with a more intuitive experience.
- Let you uncover insights about how the business is performing.
- Let you share the insights with the help of various reporting tools.
- Let you organize and visualize the data suiting business requirements.
Last but not least, Google Analytics comes with tons of features, functionalities, and the ability to create customized reports and dashboard.
- Google Ads
Google Ads can work for almost any business; it doesn’t matter whether it is small, medium, or large. While many marketers think that Google Ads is too expensive, it is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools that can help your business reach new heights.
The features of Google Ads:
- Drive website visits
- Increase the call calls from customers through a click-to-call button
- Increase footfall in your shops
People need to learn Google Ads first in order to use it effectively; else you will be wasting your money (Learn to create Google ads here). The best part about Google Ads is that return on investment (ROI) is relatively easy to measure. Moreover, new artificial intelligence features make the platform a lot faster and easier to use. The AI features can help you get results faster in Display advertising.
The multiple targeting options allow you to target your customer base based on different factors like age, gender, location, profession, etc. This is something that you will not find in other digital marketing tools.
Most importantly, you can access Google Agency Account Strategist, where you can learn about the latest features that Google provides. Moreover, access to this means access to some beta testing as well.
- Canva Business
If you are in digital marketing, you will understand the need for a quality design tool that can help you create impressive social media posts and other things in marketing. Canva is a prominent design tool that allows you to develop effective marketing campaigns through visual content that can be shared on your blogs, websites, social networks, and other platforms. Visual content is the backbone of any digital marketing campaign. In order to entice the targeted customer base, you need to design compelling posts.
The features of Canva:
- Canva allows you to edit posts and create graphs of any type and kind.
- The tool incorporates numerous templates. It boasts a massive library of stock images, photos, designs, icons, and vectors that you can use to create any type of visual content for your marketing campaign.
- It allows you to choose from a massive collection of designs, such as a postcard, brochure, CD cover, wallpaper, book cover, resume, certificate, magazine cover, letterhead, presentation graphic, blog banner, card, poster, flyer, presentation, logo, and social media.
Its simple drag-and-drop design allows you to create visual pieces according to your campaign. The best part is that you don’t need an experienced designer to create visual content for your digital marketing campaign. It is so simple that anyone with no design background can use it.
- Trello
If you are looking for a content management tool that will help you brainstorm and strategize content for your digital marketing campaign, you can opt for Trello. It is one of the most popular content management tools used by hundreds and thousands of digital marketers worldwide to create, schedule, and organize content online.
The platform keeps the whole team together, making communication a lot easier and more manageable. You can assign multiple members from your team to a single card so that they can work on a project together. This way, you will know who’s in charge of designing, writing, editing, posting, and adding call-to-action offers to a post.
The features of Trello:
- Allows you to create cards and incorporate notes on the card topic while creating deadlines and assigning topics to specific teams.
- Facilitates remote working where your teams can access their tasks and projects from anywhere.
You can use Trello for organizing your digital marketing campaigns and ensure that you never miss out on anything that your team is doing.
- Slack
Digital marketers use Slack every single day. With Slack, you can discuss client work, new articles, new projects, and new support tickets, share useful content, and send messages.
If you have a distinct team of digital marketers, you will need a powerful medium to make effective communication with them. This is where Slack comes into play.
The features of Slack:
- Makes it easier to communicate with team members over the web in real time.
- Let you follow everything related to the projects, teams, and channels.
- Let you do message and video conferencing too.
- Assist the teams in collaborating from anywhere
While it seems like a messaging app, it does a lot more than that. Slack can potentially tighten up your organizational efficiency. It is not a collaboration or a project management tool. It serves as a messaging platform with a rich collection of options and settings. It lets you have group conversations that are searchable and public, including private conversations. You can change the color scheme of the interface and create different groups.