What Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion Actu­al­ly Is (Part II)

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 ROASonline?
• 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.