Technology has changed how businesses are run. Businesses are now leveraging technology from marketing, product development, and business management to improve their processes and increase efficiency. When getting started with technology, you are likely to come across two terms: digital business and digital marketing. 

While the terms sound similar and overlap in certain areas, they differ. This article will compare the two and help you understand the similarities and differences and how you can leverage the two to take your business to the next level.

What is Digital Business?

Digital business involves creating innovative business plans meant to bridge the gaps between the physical and online worlds. It leverages technology to create value, improve customer experience, and enhance business capabilities. This can be done by making data-driven decisions or reimagining decision-making and product offerings.

Depending on the type of business, this could be through various steps such as:

• Automating workflows using productivity apps.
• Improving customer experience using AI.
• Improving business intelligence by capturing data.
• Using digital platforms to do online work.

Becoming a digital business will impact every part of your business, from customer service to employee service to backend management and maintenance.

Benefits of Having a Digital Business

Turning your business into a digital one comes with a lot of benefits. These include:

Increased Efficiency

Running manual processes in a business can be tiring, but automating them helps increase efficiency. For instance, if you were packing products manually, you would require a lot of staff, time, and effort. But by automating the process, you can increase efficiency, save time and money, and reduce the chances of mistakes.

Cut Costs

In a highly competitive business landscape, most businesses seek ways to cut costs. As noted earlier, manual processes often require more staff, leading to higher salaries. On the other hand, automation helps save money and time. Studies indicate that inefficient processes translate into 25% higher cost. That means digitizing your business processes is more cost-effective and efficient.

Consistent High-quality Services

Manual processes are usually prone to errors. On the other hand, digitizing business processes ensures low risk of errors, which means businesses can be assured of consistent high-quality outputs. For instance, automating the customer service sector can ensure that customers receive high-quality support and information.

Better Decision-making

Information management is a key part of a digital business. Companies that automate their processes have access to better information, and by analyzing such data, they can gain valuable insights that will transform their businesses.

How to Build a Digital  Business

Now that you understand the benefits of having a digital business, here are the steps to follow when digitizing your business.

Planning Stage

Before acquiring business technology, consider what you want to achieve with the technology. Remember that you are only digitizing your business to increase its growth rate. However, the wrong technology can hinder its growth. There are several steps you should follow in the planning phase. These are:

Confirm your daily processes

Consider your daily processes and look at how they are interlinked. For instance, if your business focuses on data, you must consider technology that helps with data collection, cleaning, organizing, and storage. Therefore, for your business to successfully digitize, you need to focus on improving productivity and enhancing customer experience.

Collect evidence

For digitization to work as envisioned, collect the necessary evidence. Consider your strengths and weaknesses, what competitors are doing to attract customers, future expectations, and customer expectations.

Define Your Goals

You will also need to consider what your business is trying to achieve. Find a model to help you develop the business goals. When launching a strategy, you need to be aware of three factors. These are:

• A clear and memorable goal. Ensure that your customers understand what exactly you are trying to achieve.
• A digital team to drive the technology you will be using.
• A high-level management to provide support for the digital transformation.

Consider User Experience

When choosing a tool to digitize your business, your focus should be on the customer experience. The technology should offer an end-to-end experience incorporating different aspects of the company’s offering. Therefore, it is essential to include staff members from various teams.

Ensure that the digital transformation will provide your customers with a positive experience. This could be through the unique features of customer service, ease of using technology, reliability, advertising and services, and more. Here are a few ways to help you focus more on the customer experience:

• Choose the right staff. Ensure you have the right department staff to implement the technological transformation. They should have excellent communication skills and work ethics.
• Consider customer needs. You need to ensure that you implement technology that customers will find helpful. If you spend a lot of time adding a new technology but later find out the customers don't need it, you will waste time, money, and effort. Therefore, focus on offering a customer-centric solution.
• Get enough staff. If the digitization process will succeed only if additional staff are hired, hire them. Remember that you may not have some skills in-house, so you may need to hire additional staff.

Consider Cloud-based Technology

An excellent digital transformation process usually incorporates cloud technology. Many IT decision-makers suggest that most digital processes will happen in the cloud in the next five years. With the different facets of digitization, a lot of computation power and storage space is needed, raising the need for cloud storage.

Some of the most common cloud-based technologies are knowledge management systems (KMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. One of the benefits of cloud technology is that it provides a centralized location for the management of the technology. There are also other benefits of a cloud-based system, such as:

• Tailor-made solution. No matter the industry your business is in, you can always find a tailor-made solution that fits your needs. Besides, as your business grows, the solutions can be scaled to meet its needs. But before that, you only pay for what you use.
• Secure. The threat of data security breaches is always real in an in-house data storage solution. Cloud solutions are always safer since they keep data in a decentralized system with multiple backups.
• Cost-effective. Cloud solutions don't require investment in IT infrastructure, which means you can save a lot of money and time that would otherwise have been spent maintaining such infrastructure.
• Parallel collaborations. Cloud solutions enable direct collaborations with people regardless of their ranks. Different teams can work together to access the data in the same office or remotely.

Choose an Automation Software

The right automation tool is suitable for your business. It will help you increase efficiency by streamlining processes and accelerating various tasks to ensure the automation matches your workflow and business needs. There are several steps to follow when automating. These are:

Workflow Automations 

This involves automating human tasks to make the work easier, faster, and more consistent. The aim is to reduce the need for manual but repetitive tasks.

Choose an Automation Program

Find a good program that aligns with your business needs. The program should have the necessary features to evolve process automation, task collaboration, and tracking. Consider other factors, such as cost, budget usability, and the number of users. Choose a program that integrates well with your current software for streamlined operations and data continuity.

Data Extraction

Various industries, such as legal, financial, health, and logistics, have document-intensive workflows. Automating data mining and document processing can increase cost and time efficiency as you capture data from various platforms. Through redirection, you can reduce tasks that would otherwise be manual to help your business focus on high-value tasks.

Choosing an Automation Software

When searching for automation software, ensure that it is accurate, scalable, and can integrate with your existing software. The software should also be user-friendly. You need to thoroughly check the needs of your current workflows to select a program that aligns with your business needs.

Implementing Workflow Automation

Workflow automation requires streamlining your business processes to automate the existing tasks. Start by identifying and defining your processes, such as data entry or approval workflows. Note the current workflows, including the critical decision points, stakeholders, and dependencies.

Designing the Automated Workflows

You can now select an automation tool based on the objectives you defined earlier, such as reducing errors and improving communication and processing time. This could be an RPA tool, BPM software, or a custom solution. 

Create diagrams with visual workflows illustrating the task sequence and its interactions. Allocate various permissions and roles, define responsibilities, and ensure that unauthorized persons have restricted access. Finally, integrate your program with the CRM or ERP to maintain a seamless data flow.

Get Customer and Employee Feedback

While digital business offers many benefits, some customers and employees may oppose the transformation, as people generally don't like change. This is why it is necessary to collect feedback from both parties. Besides, digital transformation is only done to enhance efficiency and improve customer service. Therefore, their opinions matter in every step of the transformation.

Customer and employee feedback will help you determine if any bugs need fixing and if other areas of the software need improvement. It will also help you determine if the program works well on mobile, as that's the preferred gadget for most users.

When collecting customer data, choose one employee to be in charge of data management. Keep the other employees informed about what is happening. When they know what is happening, they are more likely to support the data transformation process than when you push it down their throat. Find out which areas of their work process needs a digital transition.

Remember that feedback is necessary not only during the implementation but also after it. Continuous feedback is needed to help track employee experience. This can help catch issues before they happen, resulting in a positive employee morale. Most companies fail in digital transformation because they do not involve employees or collect feedback.

Therefore, to avoid the problem, involve the people working daily with technology to better understand their roles and how you can improve their processes. This is important as the changes will affect them more than anyone else.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing are the strategies and techniques a business uses to promote its products or services using digital channels. These channels include search engines, social media, PPC advertising, content marketing, multimedia messages, texts, and more. Digital marketing aims to attract, engage, and convert your target audience into customers. This can be done by creating compelling content, optimizing search engine websites, and using data insights to improve user experience.

Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

Many users also configure digital marketing with inbound marketing. This is understandable as both use tools like online content, email marketing, and more. Both also focus on capturing the customer's attention. The main difference between the two is how they approach the goal with their tools. 

A brand's digital marketing can use various platforms while focusing on one. For instance, it may use email or social media marketing without focusing on other digital spaces. On the contrary, inbound marketing is a more holistic concept. It considers the available tools to determine the one that will be most effective in reaching the target audience. It also looks at the stage of the sales funnel when that will happen.

For instance, your goal might be increasing website traffic to gain more leads and prospects. To achieve this goal, you can focus on search engine optimization while creating a good content marketing strategy. That will result in more optimized content, such as landing pages, blogs, etc.

When considering digital marketing and inbound marketing, the most important thing to remember is that the two aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, they work well when used in collaboration with one another. With inbound marketing, you get structure and the purpose of effective digital marketing strategies. That ensures that digital marketing is helping you reach your goal.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

In the recent past, we have seen an increased importance of digital marketing due to more audiences moving to digital channels. However, here are some of the benefits of digital marketing.

A Broader Audience

When you post an ad online, people from all over the world can see it. Then, you can easily reach and connect with a bigger audience across different channels.

Cost-efficient

With a good digital marketing program, you can reach a broader audience than traditional marketing but also at a lower cost. A digital marketing campaign can consist of emails delivering messages to target customers at a given schedule. Similarly, a social media digital strategy consists of publishing posts to grow organically.

On the other hand, traditional marketing, such as TV, newspaper, and billboard, has high overhead costs. When you compare the two, you realize that digital marketing offers more flexibility and customer contact for the ad spend.

Measurable Results

It can be hard to determine if traditional ads are working or not. You should do surveys asking customers how they found you. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for all industries. Many industries don’t even have a one-on-one conversation with their customers, which may not bring the desired results.

Digital marketing makes it simple to track results. Platforms such as Google, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter offer extensive analytics to enable this. Third-party tools such as HubSpot, Ahref, and SproutSocial will also show your campaign's performance.

Better Personalization

Data obtained from digital marketing can be used to personalize your customers' experience. For instance, many social media analytics will show your audience's interests, age, sex, and other demographic data. You can then use this information to improve the customer’s experience.

Better Connections with Customers

When you learn about a social media campaign, not only will your audience see your posts, but they can also share and comment on them. This can result in a bigger buzz around your product or service. The more people comment, like, and share your posts, the higher the visibility of the posts.

Better Conversion

With digital marketing, customers can take action immediately after viewing your content or ad. Unlike traditional advertising, the best results you can get after someone has viewed your content or ad is a phone call. Remember that someone who hears your ad on the radio while driving on the highway has no time to call you.

However, when someone sees your ad on social media or any other platform, they can immediately click on it or at least save it. Even when they don't immediately make a purchase, they will stay connected and provide you with a chance to interact with them in the future. Therefore, you can increase your conversion with digital marketing.

Steps in Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy

It can be difficult to get started in digital marketing if you are a small business or a beginner. However, several tips can help you create an effective strategy for engagement, brand awareness, and sales.

Set Goals

Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) goals for your digital marketing strategy. While there are many goals you can focus on, choose the one that will help propel you forward rather than keeping you stagnant.

Determine Your Target Audience

The next step for any marketing campaign is to identify your target audience. These are the people you hope to reach with your campaigns. You can use attributes such as gender, age, purchasing power, and demographics. By understanding your target audience, you can quickly determine the digital marketing channel to use and the information you will use in the campaign. You can also choose the channels to engage with your target audience.

Budget Creation

A budget will enable you to spend your marketing budget prudently without overspending. When creating your budget, consider the marketing channel and the goal you have in mind. For instance, if your goal is to run ads for conversion, your budget will be higher than some using social media posts to reach their target audience.

Choose a Digital Marketing Platform

As noted earlier, there are lots of platforms you can use for your digital marketing. Choose one depending on your audience, budget, and goals.

Keep Improving

Once you select a campaign, you should note that it will be hard to get it right. That's why you need to keep analyzing your campaign data to determine what you are doing well and the areas of improvement. This will enable you to improve your future campaigns. As noted earlier, digital marketing has many tools to track your marketing in one place.

How a Digital Business and Digital Marketing Blend

Even though digital marketing and a digital business have unique focuses, they also go hand in hand. Any effective digital business should also have an excellent digital marketing strategy. No matter how efficient your digital business is, it will be lost if customers aren't aware of it. Incorporating an outstanding digital marketing strategy can help you drive traffic, generate leads, and ensure the success of your digital business.

Conclusion

In a dynamic ecommerce world, digital marketing and digital business play an essential role. The primary role of digital marketing is to bring customers to the business’ door. It helps companies to stay in contact with the customers and get personalized customer data. By embracing digital marketing, companies can realize an unmatched growth potential.

On the other hand, a digital business ensures that they have a good experience by transforming the operations and structure of the company. By acknowledging the differences in these two concepts and taking advantage of their symbiotic relationships, businesses can easily thrive in the digital space. You can also read our guide on Instagram marketing strategy.