Digital transformation – a never-ending process

Many companies and organisations are having to face up to the fact that they need to change the way they communicate, in order to put digital at the core of their marketing, internal and other stakeholder comms.

Plus they are having to adapt their processes, so digital becomes integrated into their offering, in a way that wasn’t envisaged a few years ago.

The drivers for this are not only the proliferation of platforms and apps that make this possible, but also changing consumer habits and expectations. All stakeholders now expect to be able to find out a wide range of information about an organisation, to be treated like a valuable commodity rather than a tiresome obligation, and to interact in a way that is becoming ever more sophisticated, in depth and meaningful.

In marcoms, it’s now impossible to find a point where digital ends and traditional marketing begins: they’re one and the same thing, and it’s no longer acceptable to talk about ‘digital marketing’. Rather as Diageo’s CEO Ivan Menezes said: “It’s not about doing ‘digital marketing’, it’s about marketing effectively in a digital world.”

Nor is it a finite project, with a start and a finish. Digital is forever changing, as are habits, and so it requires fundamental changes to the company and its processes, rather than just changes to the way the marketing department does things.

In short, digital transformation is actually business transformation, and let’s face it – we’re only at the beginning of a journey that will last the rest of our lives.