Let’s face it: the world is changing fast, but not all businesses are keeping up. 

Digital transformation is real, and it’s happening right now. However, many companies are still unsure of how to take advantage of new technologies like artificial intelligence or blockchain technology — or even how to use social media effectively. 

By adopting digital technology into your organization, you improve efficiency, value, and innovation while also giving rise to new business models and revenue streams. We’re here to help you navigate the digital waters with confidence and clarity, so you can keep up with your industry and maximize your profits.

 

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Where Are We Going From Here?

We are no longer in the era of social media, that’s old news. We’re in the digital age. 

Embracing the digital age is not about technology for technology’s sake. It is about human-centered, holistic thinking. The ability to harness data, insights, and experiences to imagine different possibilities for your business, for your customers, and for your relationship with customers.

Digital Transformation is not just about creating more digital products; it’s about rethinking every part of a company and every part of a customer experience using technology as an enabler to make that change possible.

First-party Data Enrichment & Enablement

Keeping up with the ongoing digital transformation is a significant challenge for most companies. 

In order to stay competitive in today’s marketplace, businesses need to constantly innovate and evolve their business models, processes, and products. This means making decisions based on data-driven insights rather than intuition. Companies that do this successfully are able to respond quickly to new opportunities while also reducing risk by leveraging historical data from past experiences with similar situations.

This is where first-party data comes in. When used correctly, first-party data can be leveraged in innovative ways to build better products, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduce churn, enhance sales productivity, increase operational efficiency — even build new revenue streams through cross-selling opportunities and other forms of upselling. 

First-party data is paramount in creating successful campaigns, but marketers now have less access than ever before to the information needed to conceive informed strategies.

See digital transformation in action.

 

Post iOS 14.5 Marketing Attribution

Apple’s iOS 14.5 update rolled out in mid-2021, focusing on your mobile digital privacy. While the overall privacy updates protect the end-consumer from malicious data-mining and increased control over PII, it also permanently limited third-party cookies, restricting data that marketers could access, and now Google has also rolled out an update to their mobile OS, Android that will restrict the information advertisers can pull from its platforms.

What does this mean for marketers? Once Google rolls out its update, advertisers will have less data on their users than ever before. And that means fewer ads that are relevant to the user’s interests and needs—making it more difficult to target specific audiences. 

If you’re a marketer trying to reach a specific audience with your ads, this can be concerning, but not to worry. We’ve experienced this before, and we developed a few tricks to keep us at the top of your customers’ searches: 

  • Follow the consumer’s behavior on your site to maximize its SEO efficiency
  • Track the specific paths/keywords a user has taken to get to the site to further optimize your ad content
  • Diversify ad spend across multiple platforms and find your perfect mix.
  • Use UTM parameters on site’s URLs to generate data tracked by Facebook through to Google Analytics
  • Take advantage of GA 4’s tracking to further filter data by User, Event, and Session segments.
    • Segments give precise control over when and where data was gathered, allowing us to analyze minor changes and their impacts.

With less data available, it’s going to be harder to target specific audiences—but that’s the way the cookies crumble in our digital age.

 

Digital Experiences & Operations

Digital experiences are no longer just about technology, it’s about the people who use it, how they use it and what they get out of it.

It’s essential to keep in mind that the goal is not to improve your company’s digital customer experience, it’s to bring your customers into an always-on relationship with your brand. The customer experience is only one component of this strategy — it requires you to move beyond your traditional business model and transform your entire organization into a digital enterprise.

In order to make this a reality, enterprises need to invest in three core areas:

1) People: The people who interact with your customers through all channels — mobile, web, and in-person — need to be empowered with the right tools and training to deliver an amazing experience every time.

2) Processes: There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for customer service. Each organization has its own unique challenges and opportunities that require specific processes tailored to its unique needs.

3) Technology: Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality (AR) are changing the way we work today and will continue to do so in the years ahead.

Expectations from existing technology (response time, chatbot, reviews) leave a precedent in the space of digital operations, yet half of U.S. businesses haven’t even claimed their Google MyBusiness listing. 

The best way to maintain brand reputation and client relationships? By staying engaged in an Omni-channel strategy.

Omni-channel Strategies & Full-Funnel Personalization 

Digital experiences are changing how we interact with brands. We want to be able to interact with our favorite brands at any time, from anywhere, on any device (or all of them at once). We expect instant gratification — when we want something, we want it now. And if you don’t provide an awesome experience for us, then someone else will (and they might even steal your customers).

With organic content, the best way to win over consumers is by being where they are — online, on social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook, or even just chatting with friends on WhatsApp or Snapchat — so that means you have to be there too.

Omni-channel means the culmination of all channels, including:

Social

Search

Programmatic Display

Digital TV & CTV/OTT 

OOH

Digital Audio

By being everywhere, channels work together to create a situation where the sum of the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.

When it comes to paid placements, you should understand that not every platform is suitable for every client or campaign. Researching each client’s industry, direct competitors and existing data gives us a clear picture of the platforms that will drive results and keep costs down.

Engaging consumers across platforms not only fosters brand awareness in the mind of the consumer, but also leads to improved engagement, increased ROI and sales, and enhanced customer retention and loyalty.

Reaching consumers across multiple platforms is crucial to retaining and obtaining loyal relationships. Better yet, engaging with them in a customized way will help keep the relationship strong. 

Personalized campaigns are more effective than generic ones. In customizing your message based on the customer’s needs, your message becomes more relevant and interesting to the recipient. It also allows you to send messages at times when customers are most likely to be receptive—for example, when they’re on their way home from work or school.

Personalization encompasses two pivotal courses of action:

Catalog/Retargeting:

Retargeting occurs in multitudes on the digital landscape. In short, retargeting is when ads are targeted toward users who have previously clicked on that specific product or service but did not buy yet. This helps drive engagement with customers across all platforms. 

Personalized digital experiences:

A rare find in the marketing world because most companies are not able to afford the exorbitant cost to implement this technology and practice. More global agencies are finding inefficient solutions to these issues, causing 1st party data problems.

Arguably, the best part of personalization is that you can automatically tag people and target individualized content and features straight to them through data. This is how we drive results in order to optimize our client achievements. 

 

Staying Ahead of the Curve, Added Value

In a world where technology is constantly changing, staying ahead of the curve is no easy task. 

At Cape & Bay, we are continually seeking new competencies that help drive results for our clients. We know that platforms change, and we want to make sure our clients benefit from those changes. We’re not just talking about the latest Instagram update (although we’ve got you covered there). We mean when a new platform comes out and it’s going to be huge for social media marketing, we don’t wait until it’s too late—we start researching and testing strategies before it launches. Working directly with certain platforms gives us a conduit of support and information regarding new updates. Before any launch, we ensure all ends meet every requirement. 

By keeping detailed histories of each platform’s targeting changes, security updates, and ongoing updates we are able to minimize the impact it will have on our clients. Opposite of these limiting factors, we routinely monitor new innovations on each platform. With Google replacing Universal Analytics with Analytics 4, we’ve ensured our entire team is certified with this new program almost a year prior to its release. We’ve also ensured all of our clients have fully made the switch to GA4. This way, we know our clients won’t suffer any time loss when working through this adaptation. 

The world and media platforms are changing fast. Learn how your brand can partner with Cape & Bay to create a digital transformation for your business and stay ahead of the technology curve. Give us a call