During the COVID-19 pandemic, technology is playing its role in driving growth and revenue and leveraging each business’s ability to thrive. Workflow has significantly changed during this pandemic. But there is nothing to worry about, because challenges present opportunities. This pandemic has taught organizations to operate effectively and taught them to be agile, robust, and secure.
Organizations must engage more and more customers and employees, both in physical and digital domains, so that their businesses can grow smoothly and efficiently. Unfortunately, achieving success during this time of crisis is never easy and demands a lot more effort and concentration.
Valid questions therefore include these two: Which technologies will make a significant difference during this pandemic? How can these technologies help organizations succeed during this time of crisis? Let’s find out.
Digital Acceleration
Digital transformation and digital acceleration are more or less the same things. However, the term “acceleration” places more emphasis on the idea of speed, which is undoubtedly an essential characteristic that defines the recent digital revolution.
Digital transformation is all about leveraging the latest technologies to improve businesses. Digital acceleration does not just depend on applying and gathering data from the processes; instead, it involves working on the growth and development of your business, using data and digital learning.
There is no doubt that technology is critical for organizations and its degree of implementation can be a crucial determinant of their overall success and length of survival.
Some significant factors that have contributed toward the increase in the demand for a digital presence include those brought on by a generational change in the makeup of our workforce and a fast pace of change that has been realized by all of our technological advancements.
Importance of Digital Transformation
With remote work and remote learning becoming common, we expect to see a significant boost in digital transformation in the years to come.
Reports suggest that organizations that realized the importance of technology adoption outperformed their competitors during this COVID-19 disruption. Tech-savvy organizations surpassed their peers by a minimum of six percentage points on average in the 12 industries in which technology was used as a performance indicator.
Furthermore, the technology workflow is changing drastically. The implementation of the cloud and artificial intelligence are gaining significant importance as performance indicators.
Keeping these things in mind, we expect to see a vast majority of B2B firms adopting a truly digital-first and digital-centric philosophy in 2021, especially when it comes to sales and marketing. This brings us to what we are referring to as digital acceleration.
Digital acceleration involving digital tactics and channels will include plenty of things already present in the B2B marketer’s toolkit, but now there is a need for them to have a greater emphasis and more intentionality in their application.
Which Factors Enhance the Effectiveness of Digital Transformation?
Let’s look at how things will change in the near future and what digital acceleration will look like.
● Videos
Undoubtedly, video creation for marketing purposes has become a dominant activity in recent years. It is an incredibly powerful tool to convey a message, sell your product, and engage additional audiences. Studies estimate that by 2022, online videos will account for more than 80% of all the consumer internet traffic, which is approximately 15 times higher than what it was back in 2017.
Although many organizations are still not fully taking advantage of video platforms, we expect to see a change in 2021. Organizations that were not involved in video creation have realized the importance of this activity and are working to engage more and more customers through what can be accomplished through video creation. They have learned that B2B buyers crave video content when it comes to getting detailed information regarding the products they are considering.
B2B marketers should therefore invest in Vlogs, team introductions, product and service specifications, and tutorials, as these types of videos will be powerful tools as the year plays out.
● Virtual Events
We know that during this COVID-19 pandemic, almost all conferences and trade shows have been canceled. As a result, virtual events have become such a popular and effective replacement that, no matter what happens in the upcoming time period, even after we are rid of this pandemic, these virtual events are here to stay. In fact, the popularity of these virtual events is expected to increase significantly in 2021.
Another benefit of this approach is that it brings a broadcast quality to the event by taking some cues from TV production principles. However, this indicates that to ensure the success of the virtual events in this format, investment levels will have to really be stepped up .
● SEO and SEM Tools
SEO and SEM are powerful optimization tools that are not new to B2B marketers. An increase in digital consumption and the growing importance of a corporate website encourage B2B marketers to invest more in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) — an amount that may even rival what is spent by their B2C counterparts. And they will need to take into account both off-page and on-page strategies.
In addition, there is now an increased emphasis on semantic search, search intent, and voice search. As a result of this, user behaviors are significantly evolving. Hence, SEO, SEM, and PPC will be playing a significant role in driving traffic to your website.
● Marketing Automation and Email Marketing
Marketing automation was a powerful tool in the early 2010s; however, it cooled off as we approached the end of this decade. Although many B2B marketers signed up for this software, successful implementation was not as widespread as the industry hoped.
In this recent times, automation is making a comeback, and the software is now significantly improved. The sales are expected to double in the upcoming five years. Driven by trends such as personalization, account-based marketing, retention marketing, and email marketing, this will become more significant in B2B marketing strategies.
● Robotic Process Automation
Digital transformation can be regarded as the art of digitizing information and processes. Initially, digitization involved buying and selling (e-commerce) only. Later on, people realized that there is a considerable opportunity to assess all functions within a company. Recently, there has been a lot more discussion to leverage intelligence and automate simple processes by taking advantage of robotic process automation (RPA). This latest advancement in technology won’t depend on human decisions.
Final Thoughts
We hope this brief blog post helped you realize the importance of digital acceleration. Especially in light of this COVID-19 pandemic, it is compulsory for organizations to improve their digital performance.
In the years to come, we expect to see many other improvements and innovations in B2B marketing strategies. So, for organizations to not only survive during this pandemic wave, but also to be a real player in the future, they need to embrace advancements in the digital world today.
