Are You Embracing Digitization?

Every now and then you see these studies about who is or isn't a "laggard" in some marketing technology. I always found the term a bit manipulative — after all, one man's laggard is another's smart shopper — but when it comes to digital transformation, or digitization, I think there's something to it. We held a webinar yesterday with Workfront on "3 'Digitization' Trends Shaping Modern Marketing," where I spoke with Workfront's Brandon Jensen, Alanna Peet of Accenture and Jennifer Johnson of Informatica. And while they had slightly different viewpoints on digitization, they all said one phrase the same: "You have to embrace it." And some of our viewers clearly have not embraced it. So they asked about how to make their organizations more digital ... And I have to say, they were a little hard for any of the speakers to answer, because their companies already were fully digital and had been for years. What exactly does that mean? Well Johnson described how new hires at Informatica start on a Monday, and on that first day they're given their laptop with all the apps they're going to use and all the logins and permissions they need. That laptop with those apps contains probably 90 percent of what would have traditionally been in the office for an analog worker. Now, they still have an office — this is not about working remotely — but the whole marketing job has been digitized. We talk about digital marketing as the channel through which marketing is deployed, but that's what it meant a decade ago. Today, at many top brands and marketing agencies, digital marketing isn't just what they do, it's what they are. And it's not just how the marketing workers interface with the company and their work, it's how customers interface with those companies as well. As we talked yesterday, what became clear was, to successfully connect with the connected consumer, it doesn't just take digital marketing as a tactic or ad channels. It takes embracing the digital world and the tools and everything you can do with them. Peet's number one tip, and we came back to it several times, was that through digitization, you can be automating many of the slow, repetitive tasks that burn your time (and burnout your nerves). Data entry, message responses, testing ... all of these tasks and more could be automated. This can save you an enormous amount of time and energy that would be better spent on the creative and rewarding (both for you and your employer) aspects of your work. I admit, I have not embraced digitization as much as I probably could. There are a lot of things in my day to day (and all of Target Marketing's day to day) that are not automated and probably could be. And that has me thinking as well. Peet suggested you think about those little annoying tasks and actively identify things you'd like to automate. I bet you can quick make a list of a dozen. If you can automate even half of those, wouldn't it make a huge difference? So I ask again, are you embracing digitization? If not, you could be missing out on the marketer's equivalent of the industrial revolution.

Personnel/HR/Career Management

Are You Embracing Digitization?

Thorin McGee

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Thorin McGee