Or: A practical checklist for digital transformation
In our previous issue, we explored how digital transformation is less about chasing trends, and more about creating adaptable systems. Today I’ll try to give you a few hard questions, and a lot of actionable ones, that can help you build them.
Everything revolves around being able to effectively talk to our customers.
A transaction is nothing more than a process of communication that ends up with one or more parties exchanging value. Selling is just another form of connection. The only difference between a purchase order and a Tuesday night chat with your better half is that, in order to talk to our customers, we need a product or service. And in order to have a successful one, we must surround those goods with a story (brand), a symbol (logo), value (product), and a business structure (tech and operations).
Can you answer any of these questions within sixty seconds?
I believe that, to have a successful and professional business, we must pay attention to four aspects of reality. I’ll share some questions with you on each. Your ability (or inability) to answer them should drive your technology roadmap, and not the other way around.
Context
The essential elements of our play. Ourselves and our worldview, our customers, and their perception —the stage. What they feel about their needs, what they consider to be cheap, expensive, fancy, boring, ground-breaking or disgusting. It’s their script. We just play a little role in it.
So “Context”, in a nutshell, is the space between us. Hence, the questions:
- Do you categorically know who your customers are?
- Do you know exactly how you’re found? Why did they choose you?
- Do you know what they think of your product?
- Do you fully understand how they use it? Have you asked them?
- Can they tell the difference between you and your top three competitors?
- Do you know what your competitors do undoubtedly better than you?
- Have you thought about how technology is changing your customers? Will they be the same in five years? Will they still need you?
And the hardest one: Do you have any agency over this context? Consider this for a second. It happens to me that, as a former 80s kid, whenever I see a Coca-Cola Ad I get thirsty. And if I see someone smoking in a movie I want to light one up.
Global brands have the power to shape-shift reality and habits. Can you, at your scale, and up to which degree?
I’m sure you might, if you figure out where your customers are. How they interact with their world and what they expect from it.
Medium
We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. How does the media you use influence your own company? Consider this:
- Do you have symbols, at all?
- Are your logo and coded branding (colors, fonts, motto, voice and tone) clear to your customers?
- Do they make it easy enough for your clients to remember you?
- What do you enhance? Are you improving what your customers had before in any way?
- Which are the proper channels for your symbols and content in social media?
- And in the real world?
- How are you positively changing the lives of your clients and your distributors or dealers?
Reflect on your own product as a medium. As its own channel, its own way to carry a message. Anything made by humans and shipped into the world through a symbol (e.g. your logo) is indeed media.
What is the mark you’re leaving behind?
Content
If symbols carry the intuitive meaning of who we are, content is the actual stuff we want to say. The message we need to make sure is received loud, clear, without doubt, in a manner that drives buying decisions or, at the very least, mental availability.
- Do you clearly know your positioning?
- Can you articulate it? Can anyone in management, sales or marketing articulate it?
- Have you proven, objectively, that your customers understand it?
- Do you have a distinctive voice and tone in your message?
- Is that message coherent across the board? Are your emails, website, customer care or outreach calls clearly consistent with your identity?
- Does your message tackle your potential customers’ fears and objections?
- Do you have a narrative that can onboard new customers, driven by humans and/or technology?
- Can you answer the questions: “Why should we buy from you”, and “Why now”?
- Do you share that story with a cadence that triggers loyalty?
What are you conveying, and how? Figure out what you have to say, how it’s different from the other agents in your space, and then you’ll be able to use technology to accelerate the delivery of your message.
Interplay
Good things come to those who wait. Now that you made it this far, we can get to the very actionable metrics. Welcome to the Interplay: the invisible space where context, content and media come together. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, and it’s different for every company, but it’s reasonably easy to measure what it does.
If your tech stack is right, you should be able to find answers to these questions in about sixty seconds.
I’m curious to know how many of these you’re ready for.
Ready, set, go!
- How are you found? Which acquisition channels work best?
- What’s your cost of acquisition?
- What’s the ROAS online?
- What’s your marketing budget?
- What’s your retention rate?
- What’s your NPS? And your eNPS?
- What’s the average ticket, frequency and recency of each of your primary customer segments?
- What’s your customer lifetime value? How many orders will they make?
- Which segments of your audience are your brand champions?
- Who’s generating 80% of your revenue?
- Where are the next two or three opportunities for expansion (the new contexts) you could tackle in the next few years?
- Which percentage of purchases happen online? And what’s their income equivalent?
- How many of your users rage-click through your website?
- What’s the percentage of returns? Can you measure the cost?
- What’s the size of your email list? What’s the growth rate? And what’s the acquisition cost of a single email?
- How many organic visits does a single sale require?
- Which 20 products are leading the most sales?
- What’s the percentage of abandoned carts? And how many of these do you save through email automation?
- What do customers think is your biggest strength?
- What’s your market share?
- Which are the three top threats you see your company facing in the next two years?
- What’s your revenue per visitor? Does it stay linear if you grow your traffic?
- How much income comes from affiliates? And dealers?
- Website experience: Average session duration, page views per visit, bounce rate.
- How do you compare these to your competitors and your industry in general?
Ideally, for each of these you should have historical data to understand the evolution, and a way to consolidate the information so you can use your understanding of the industry to surface patterns and discover insights.
Now we're talking
Now we can have a shot at defining what digital transformation is, when related to ecommerce, sales, media and talking to our customers:
Digital transformation is using technology to answer a shitload of questions, in less than a minute, so you can understand what needs to be done, fixed, or improved, in order to spend your time making money.
We live in strange days, but I’m an optimistic guy. Any growing business can now access solutions that, when I founded the agency in 2006, were only reserved for big shots. It’s a matter of questioning a lot, figuring out where we want to be, and getting shit done. These are the days, and the future is yours for the taking.
PS: We can answer all of these and more.
Find me here if you want to have a chat.
Santiago.-
