In the previous year, digital marketing transformation has advanced at a rate of up to seven years.

Many companies who’ve put money into the process were shocked by the rapidity and success of their digital marketing efforts.

Many businesses anticipate that the changes they’ve made will last. They’re putting money down to make sure new ideas and techniques are implemented in their operations.

If your professional services organization is ready to invest in digital marketing transformation, you’ll need to gain clarity on three essential elements:

  • Goal setting
  • Brand positioning
  • Internal and external benchmarks

A digital marketing strategy framework serves as a road map to help you get your organization where it wants to be digital.

It also assists you in making smart judgments that allow you to capitalize on your competitive edge and increase value for your clients and customers.

Knowing What You Want Your Digital Transformation Strategy to Accomplish

Setting goals helps you to understand where you are now and where you want to be.

Understanding the various elements of your marketing mix is essential to formulating a strategy for long-term success.

It shows you how digital marketing, or your digital transformation strategy, will help you achieve your objectives.

Defining your company’s definition of success is essential. You must first define your market, where you fit in it, and the digital tools and methods you’ll use to help ensure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns.

A solid digital marketing strategy is needed for:

In-depth business discovery. A digital strategy framework allows you to connect with your target audience and provide exceptional client experiences that add value for the consumer and for your business.

Providing direction. Organizational tactics have been focused on which technologies to invest in for the most part.

Digital initiatives assess the activities and procedures that must be changed to provide excellent services for your clients.

Ensuring there are no missed opportunities. A successful digital transformation lays the groundwork for future growth.

It allows you to recast yourself as needed when markets, services, and consumer demands alter.

A digital strategy should be ambitious enough to project how future possibilities may arise.

Reach your target audience where they are online. Audience targeting involves analyzing data to identify your consumers by criteria such as age or interests.

The goal is to reach the right people on the right device at the right moment. Targeting lets you connect with potential customers who are already interested in or searching for your unique products and services.

Brand differentiation. It’s pretty simple: do you want to blend in with or stand out from the competition?

It’s possible to differentiate your firm through personalized service.

Personalized service branding helps clients discover the reasons why they should select your business over others.

It should not be concerned with a price; rather, it should emphasize the advantages you provide that your competition lacks and how your solution addresses unique issues that other businesses can’t.

Tracking ROI. For a business, the return on investment for all digital marketing strategies must be measured.

Measuring ROI can help you figure out what aspect of your digital strategy is working and what else may be altered to improve results.

When you measure, analyze, and improve your digital marketing ROI, you’ll be better equipped to run successful digital marketing activities and expand your professional services business.

Still unclear on what your digital strategy should look like? Let’s dig a little deeper.

Digital Transformation/Digital Strategy Framework Explained

A framework for digital strategy is only a guide for how your organization will put digital solutions into current operations and processes.

It involves:

Clear targets. “We want to be on Facebook and YouTube,” is how many companies begin their digital marketing discussion. We want to be on all social media platforms.

However, that is a bottom-up method that skips over the critical phases of the digital transformation process.

Put another way, why would someone start publishing to social media sites if they haven’t yet figured out who they’re trying to reach—or even what their message is?

The first step in creating a digital framework is to identify business goals, objectives, and desired results.

Management buy-in. Any successful transition to a digital world requires a firm cultural buy-in.

Digital transformation is difficult to execute, as any business leaders will tell you.

Many executives are hesitant to make changes and would rather maintain the practices that have been in place for years or decades.

The companies that are most successful at digital strategies have high leadership engagement and alignment.

Early, easy wins. By definition, digital transformation entails significant innovations in the current state of affairs. If you want to build momentum toward loftier digital goals, it helps to initially target what many in the field call “easy wins.”

With digital marketing plan, can mean transforming an existing website or building a new one to drive new business objectives and differentiate your brand.

You can also use a digital marketing strategy to develop and nurture new business partnerships.

The Russian nesting or Matryoshka dolls is a great visual for describing the digital transformation, digital strategy, and a digital marketing plan.

The largest or outer doll symbolizes digital transformation and includes all of the new tools, technologies, and methods that are being used in your company’s various processes.

The medium doll is the digital strategy for how your digital transition will be implemented.

The smallest, inner doll is a component of your complete digital plan.

The dolls all work together to help your professional services organization adapt to new market realities, increase your reach, and protect your market share from competitive threats.

A digital transformation must affect the organization as a whole in order to be successful.

It necessitates an open-minded approach and an appreciation of how diverse technologies may be utilized to gather data, help employees do their jobs, and improve the customer experience.

Examples of successful digital transformations include:

IKEA, which used new technologies to change the shopping experience for customers while optimizing operations costs.

Task Rabbit was purchased by Homejoy in 2017, allowing it to provide assembly services to consumers. IKEA also built a “smart house” and an AR feature into its IKEA Place app.

The Space10 project is a research and exhibition center where fresh digital concepts are formed and exhibited.

Microsoft, the software sales leader, has gone through its own digital transformation in order to meet changing customer demands by broadening its approach beyond Windows.

It enabled mobile devices to access the platform, and it invested in cloud computing. It’s also provided open APIs so that third-party software may be more readily utilized.

Baker Hostetler, one of the most significant law firms in the United States, has a worldwide clientele.

To assist its clients optimize their operations and establish businesses with digital foundations, it has invested heavily in emerging technologies. In 2016, the firm hired “Ross,” its first AI lawyer, to work in its bankruptcy department.

The firm thinks that adopting new digital technologies allows it to improve the services it provides to clients.

There are a variety of methods firms in a variety of industries are adopting digital technologies to change their operations, as evidenced by the following examples.

As a result, their sales have skyrocketed, and they’ve become excellent examples of business innovation.

What Should a Digital Strategy Include?

This is where we return to the 3Bs that we’ve talked about in previous posts: buyer, brand, and build. From where we sit, they’re the three core elements of any digital strategy and involve asking:

  • Who are your buyers?
  • What are your buyers’ problems; what is their journey?
  • What message and position are you going to put into the market to align with those buyers?
  • How will you, over time, create and nourish relationships and present yourself as the clear choice in a particular segment of the market?
  • What’s the infrastructure, or build, you need to put in place? For instance, is your organization’s website equipped to consistently deliver your message to the targeted buyer and capture leads? Do you have marketing automation to regularly deliver messaging to leads over time?

Your digital strategy should address how the 3Bs, such as our nesting dolls, will collaborate to assist you achieve your main objective for your online presence.

How Benchmarking Gives You a Strong Starting Position

Benchmarking is a useful approach for establishing baselines, recognizing best practices, identifying areas for improvement, and fostering a competitive atmosphere. You might say that:

  • Benchmarks are the “what” and
  • Benchmarking is the “how.”

Benchmarking is different from competitor research in that it focuses on industry best practices rather than performance statistics, is required to maintain a competitive edge, and isn’t simply a “nice-to-have,” and adapts to particular consumer demands rather than following the competition’s style.

There are three categories of benchmarking:

  • When a company has already established and demonstrated best practices, it’s time to do some external benchmarking.
  • When a firm wants to evaluate its position in the industry, it does competitive benchmarking.
  • Benchmarking entails comparing the business’s direction to that of the competition. Long-term strategic benchmarking, which assesses a firm’s path in comparison to those of its competitors.

For many professional services firms, benchmarking is as easy as looking at where they are now in the context of their stated goal.

Let’s make it more apparent with a little arithmetic.

Say, for instance, you want your firm to see a 20% growth in business over the next 12 months.

  • We begin by considering how much you expanded in the last year.
  • Then we look at how many leads you’re currently getting from your digital strategy.
  • We must define exactly what advancements, investments, or modifications you’re making need to cover in order to improve leads by 20%.
  • We then want to make sure that whatever you’re attempting to achieve has a return on investment big enough to compensate for the cost of the project.

Get Started Now on Improving Your Professional Services Organization’s Digital Presence

“The competition that will kill you won’t look like you,” according to Professor Richard Suskind, Chair of the Advisory Board and a visiting professor at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Organizations that embrace digital methods, according to him, are better prepared to anticipate market changes, react faster than their competitors, and adapt their strategies in order to keep up with disruptive events.

Investing in digital transformation is a strategic response that can revitalize your professional sales organization and set it apart from the competition if your company’s established processes for obtaining new business and growing profits aren’t delivering the results you desire.

Regardless of the services you provide, building a digital strategy framework can be the guiding beacon that leads everyone in your organization toward an end goal of a revitalized, successful business.