How to win the digital race?
Do you feel strangled, at times, from the speed, with which the market digitalization evolves every day? In under 30 years, we went through the biggest technological revolution in human history. We have reached the point where every aspect of our life is instant and digitalized. This calls for dramatic, yearly changes in budget allocations and strategies. The capital investment to back them up is significant, leaving little to no room for SMEs’ small budgets to find their market niche. On the other hand, the competition, also, never sleeps and it is constantly trying to outrun us. This puts so much more pressure on what it takes for a business to win, today, than, 5 years ago or even last year. So, what, exactly, does it take to win the digital race?
Invest smartly
A company’s development is driven by brand awareness and sales growth. Hence, each year there are new advancements that shake the market and promise to stay. As seen in Gartner’s Guide in 2019 only, there was a boom of various digital marketing solutions. However, looking at the graph, Artificial Intelligence steals the scene, among all alternatives. However, Artificial Intelligence is not hyped for no reason. By 2021, 80% of emerging technologies will have AI foundations and there is a very simple explanation for this. Artificial Intelligence can be “trained” to mimic human thinking, which makes it expandable and efficient. Once trained, this system will produce efficient results in less than a minute, which will bring an absolute advantage to the market. Let’s take it further and look at the leader on the market: Amazon! They deploy AI in narrow specific processes to expedite decisions for customers (Internet of Things), and new ways to get to “yes” and eliminate the bureaucracy that forms as companies mature.
In theory, there is no limit as to what you can teach to an AI. A smart investor would foresee this opportunity, adapting to the market trends and investing in a system that
will be sustainable for future generations to come.
Adopt strategical changes
Any investment would be doomed to fail if it is not coordinated with a well-thought strategy. Most of the businesses are failing exactly at this. Usually, around 70% of businesses dedicate a big portion of their marketing budgets to new digital enhancements. However, they “forget” to update the company’s strategy to meet the digitalization requirements. In order to gain positive outcomes, an entity needs to adopt a new strategy, focusing on expansion and modernization. Only about 30% of companies, approach the digital challenge more comprehensively, revising their entire corporate strategy by going after new market segments and taking more risk. The statistic shows that the more aggressive companies accumulate 3 times more revenue and profit than the more defensive ones. Such an approach includes a heavy investment, accompanied by working environment and leadership to match the company’s digitalization, leaving behind the archaic workflow panels to embrace a modern approach to keep up with the digital evolution. This will ensure a cunning market strategy, doomed to succeed and, in addition, a high digital maturity score.
Be a digital “Early Bird”
The possibility to incorporate a digital approach that has not yet been introduced to the market is a rare opportunity. A company that adopts an early bird digitalization strategy and pairs it with even average performance in such areas as operations, culture, and talent, yields a 30% increase in revenue growth over what it would have otherwise accumulated, or 4.3% of extra revenue a year. As seen in the graph, a disruptive strategy, that turns innovation into reality, is bound to result in breaking through the highly intense digital market. Hence, this is a lucrative investment. However, to finance such a project requires great capital investment. A good idea would be, instead, to hunt down new emerging products in the field of digitalization. Usually, in the first market stage, such solutions are still very affordable. Investing in a digital breakthrough in an early stage will ensure maximizing of profits in the following years.
Be obsessed with your clients
Now, it takes much more to keep up with the competition. So in order to win, we learned that we need to differentiate. One crucial way is to understand the market’s needs. Hence, no matter how agile a strategy is, it should be client-centric. In order to keep going, any business needs customers and their needs should be the founding base of the business. All employees should know that is their job to maintain empathy and exceed customers’ expectations. They should not overlook any issue and take seriously each customer’s demand.