What role can marketers play in Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation means many things to many people, but as a marketing professional what does it mean to you?
In recent conversations with marketeers I have seen it range from images of backroom IT people rewiring the business, to a full on rip-and-replace IT programme; the sort of thing that keeps your CIO awake at night.
But in my humble opinion, the Marketing department doesn’t need to wait for a company-wide initiative to make big changes to the way they operate. Every department head has the power to use technology to positively affect how their team will look in five years’ time, and thanks to the cloud, mobile and social, you can change the conversation in your line of business from being about Digital Transformation to focusing on Digital Marketing Transformation.
Even ten years ago I do not think we were clear on how big the impact of social media and mobile would have on marketing, or the greater demands for content marketing that lay ahead
Looking ahead, it’s a safe bet Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence and, as I covered in a recent post, Wearables will be incorporated into your activities. And given what’s been happening over the past few years it’s truly exciting to picture how developments in Martech tie everything together and revolutionise the way we understand and communicate with customers.
However, helping your marketing teams pull in the same direction will be as important as ensuring your technologies are working together. Your content marketers need to work closely with search engine marketers, social media marketers rely heavily on marketing designers, and Marketing Directors need oversight of everything.
As digital marketing tactics and technologies expand, it will be even more crucial for the various parts of your marketing team to act as a whole. You need to make sure the processes are in place to ensure collaboration is baked into your marketing team’s DNA.
Disrupting collaboration
Many marketing teams are doing this by putting cloud technologies at the centre of their operations. You can fundamentally change the way your team works with content, internally and externally, by exploring cloud-based content creation and collaboration. This is particularly transformational when it’s used to get rid of things like massively long email trails, telephone tag, and the confusing web of document versions.
As a marketing professional, you know that a huge variety of people need access to documents across the organisation: to contribute to, edit, fact check, comment on, approve, distribute. Time is often a critical factor, and people just don’t have enough of it to search for what they need, particularly sales teams. This is where cloud comes into its own.
What a cloud-based content creation and collaboration platform such as Box can offer is a single location to store and share documents inside and outside the company. Having a unified system with enterprise-grade security is invaluable, particularly when you’re out of the office and need access to a particular presentation or video in a hurry.
In practice, having effective cloud-based collaboration means you don’t have to send dozens of emails back and forth to get approvals. It also means you get accurate version control and don’t waste time storing lots of different copies of a document.
All of this removes many of the unnecessary admin hurdles that take up your time and prevent you focusing on the future of digital marketing. Believe me, in ten years’ time, when you’re getting sign off on that Virtual Reality marketing campaign, you won’t send a round robin email to all stakeholders and expect them to reply with “approved”!
Watch this video for more on how Box can help the Marketing team save time, keep branding consistent and increase efficiency.
Stuart Gammon, Vice President Sales Europe at Box
