By the latest estimates, digital transformation has become the #1 IT priority for businesses worldwide, and global spending on digital transformation will exceed 2.3 trillion by 2024. And while it cannot be denied that the COVID-19 crisis had a major role in this trend, pushing businesses to embrace digital processes faster than planned, the shift isn’t exactly surprising. Going digital means boosting business agility, adapting it to the new requirements of the market, and making sure it has what it takes to live up to the increasingly high standards of modern customers.
Digital transformation is a complex process and the way you choose to approach it depends on factors such as your business size, niche, and existing infrastructure. There is no universal recipe for success, and you may need to experiment with various tools until you find the perfect formula that works for you. The commonest mistake people make is to think that just a simple adaptation, without any further adjustment. These three ideas are a perfect starting point for digital transformation because they apply to businesses in almost all fields and don’t require high costs.
Why Does it Matter?
Now that we’ve established the necessity of digital transformation. We can see that the most important reason why this happens is the question of survival. When talking about digitalization, we can see that these were highly beneficial, even before the pandemic impacted the whole world. Many people worked remotely before 2024. It can be said that this is what set the tone for what we now have, and what we will see in the future. Now, let’s talk about particular way how this can be done, and why it is so important.
Use Virtual Booths as an Alternative to Trade Shows
Trade shows used to be a major source of leads before the pandemic, and thousands of businesses counted on them to engage with audiences. However, the entire industry is now on pause and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, leaving many in need of replacement. It can be said that we are in for a pretty long pause.
Therefore, these changes will need to be implemented on so many different levels. We can expect that many of them will not go without some people losing their job positions. That replacement is virtual booths, and almost as soon as the first social distancing measures were imposed, their adoption rate skyrocketed. As you can imagine, the adoption of this approach will be much higher in the future.
Functioning on the same principles as real-world booths, virtual booths allow virtual guests to explore your products and services in an immersive way. They can be integrated on your website, hosted via a third party, or used for virtual trade shows, and development costs are considerably lower compared to regular booths – a key benefit that has piqued the interest of budget-conscious marketers.
Even if you didn’t use to attend trade shows before the pandemic, virtual booths remain an innovative solution worth exploring. It can be said that this is an approach that will be present in our world for a really good number of years. The reason being that we are talking about a technology that can be considered as a top-notch quality when it comes to technology. So, we better get used to it, do we?
Count on Social Media to Maintain Consumer Engagement
In the digital age, the consumers’ need for engagement and meaningful interactions is greater than ever. And in a post-pandemic world, this need will become even more pronounced. So, even if you use social media already, now is the time to increase post frequency and consider new ways of boosting engagement. Thankfully, there are a lot of different strategies you can implement to boost everything that surrounds your social media accounts.
There are a couple of them, and each of them is crucial for the success of your strategy. No matter the platform you are on (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn), make sure your posts are not just a means of self-promotion, but also an opportunity for audiences to make their voices heard and see the human side of your business. We’ve mentioned the fact that there are a lot of different ways you can enhance them. Make sure that you’ve studied all of them well.
Invest in Digital Infrastructure
Regardless of your industry, it’s crucial to consider the benefits of digital infrastructure: cloud-based tools that can streamline business operations. And here options are endless: from communication tools that allow your team to collaborate remotely to CRM tools that take customer relations to the next level. In this day and age, continuing to rely solely on obsolete physical processes can slow down your businesses and cause bottlenecks that will cost you down the line.
We’ve mentioned the fact that the global pandemic of coronavirus has made pretty much all businesses to adopt these. We can see that investing in adopting these technologies is crucial. So, the businesses who’ve already done it are now strolling through these hard times much easier. Employees are now working from their homes and these technologies make this process much effective nowadays. Not only that, we can expect that these will be more implemented in the future. So, pretty much every business, from all industries, need to prepare themselves for these movements in the world.
The Bottom Line
We can see that there are a lot of people who have a completely wrong perspective when talking about a digital transformation. Digital transformation is not only about one element. In fact, we can see that digital transformation embraces a wide array of different factors and elements that have a say in a lot of different fields of today’s world of business.
