Today, buyers employ digital means to explore, educate and
execute their choices. Those efforts occur without any vendor interaction and
as automation and new forms of AI evolve, the business of digital will be
exactly that - digital. The question is, are you digital to your
audience?
Before you can be relevant to your buyers, you must build a
foundation of six digital first imperatives.
In order to be relevant to your audience, you need to
embrace The Business of Digital by following these six imperatives. Once you have refined your business
philosophy, you will need a roadmap to success that begins with establishing an
onramp to transform your marketing, sales, and customer services execution. Brand harmony that makes you relevant to your audience.
These are the six imperatives to achieving exponential
growth. They start with knowing how to build a digital first business.
Building the Business
Critical to the foundation of every business, be it a sole
proprietor or a global enterprise, is recognizing that your business needs to
be built on the concept of making everything possible digital first. You may
have a piece of the pie operating digitally, however, unless the experience you
offer is integrated, those parts of the business that operate manually cannot
endure exponential growth.
Running the Business
Once you can define the business model that is built on the
foundation of being digital first, you will need a team of internal and
external resources to execute the model.
No amount of digital technology, automation or AI will replace the human
purpose. Talent is essential to drive creativity, innovation and resilience to
change.
Supporting the Business
The exploding number of channels your buyers use to make
informed decisions requires technology to assist in the engineering and
management of the buyers' digital experience journey. Supporting the business
requires a blend of resources that include full time employees, contractors,
commercial advisors, technical expertise, marketing mavens and skilled sales.
Talent that has tenacity.
Innovating the Business
Many organizations become successful quickly, relying on a
key product or service offerings to their portfolio of customers. Somewhere
along the way, they forget to innovate.
Innovation is the fuel that drives growth. Without it,
your business is a risk and becomes stale-dated.
Growing the Business
Now that you have engineered innovation into the fabric of
the business, you need to install a digital engine to grow. Every digital first
business requires a digital "hub" that harmonizes sales, marketing
and customer services.
Acquiring new Business
In order to acquire new business, you may acquire an
existing business to fill in the white space, or a new option would be to
reshape the relevancy of your brand, such that you are considered the leader in
your business category.
These six imperatives are based on decades of contributing
roles with start-ups, emerging technologies and Fortune 100 enterprises. In
every scenario, their growth was attributed to applying these six imperatives
every day. Ironically, all of those
companies exist to this day.
