Why marketing organizations are transforming their organizations with driving digital practices

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at KintoneConnect on Driving Digital: Key Practices to Lead a Smarter and Faster Transformation. The talk included some key concepts from my book, Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology on why digital impacts most businesses, how agile planning practices drive transformation, and how organizations can increase their digital capabilities with citizen data science and lowcode development programs.

The fun thing about this talk was that it was largely to a non-technical, non-executive audience who were very eager to learn about how to leverage digital practices to drive business transformation. It reminded me of a recent post, 3 questions from employees on digital transformation and how to answer them based on another recent talk on the sacrifices executives and employees need to make to drive a digital transformation.

Applying Driving Digital Practices in Marketing.

Why Marketing? In some ways, the marketing department has undergone similar strategic, practice, technology, and skill transformations as IT departments over the last several years.

• • In technology, many companies are adopting the practices of software development companies in order to compete in a digital world. Similarly, many marketing organizations are developing comparable digital marketing practices to B2C companies including developing digital brands, positioning products and running omnichannel marketing programs.

• • Marketing today is largely driven by a set of experiments aiming to reach prospects and customers with a call to action. Many are adopting agile marketing practices that enable them to develop experiments aligned with strategy, prioritize a backlog, and execute marketing programs similar to how technology organizations leverage agile development practices.

• • Marketing departments must be extremely data driven in order to identify customer segments, align messaging, and optimize channel experiences.

• • Similar to technology organizations, marketing teams are often one organizational function removed from the direct sales and support of customers. But in today’s digital world, both marketing and technology organizations are being given digital charters to drive customer experiences and grow revenue.

• Also like technology organizations, it’s important for marketing organizations to drive efficiencies through automation and to leverage a toolbox of cloud and SaaS tools to enable new capabilities.