You may have heard the phrase “digital transformation” being tossed around lately, but may be wondering what exactly it means.
Digital transformation has gone under a number of names over the past few decades, most notably “digitization,” but the meaning has not changed: Digital transformation, or whatever other name you may know it as, refers to the process of a business or organization adopting digital technologies for the sake of efficiency and greater profits.
Efficiency and greater profits, however, are not a guarantee for a business that goes digital. As it is with many implementations meant to boost a company’s performance, it takes dedicated strategic planning for a business to truly optimize the potential of the technologies it adopts.
Many digital transformations bring a change that either wholly replaces or simply supplements a human process with a digital solution that can achieve the same of better results in less time and with inhuman ability.
At this point, you may be wondering what kind of digital technologies we are referring to. Allow us to elaborate with a few examples, and how they can best be used, instead of wasted, by a business.
All of the following examples are artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that, for a business owner, are “plug-in-and-watch” solutions, meaning that these implementations can work independently without any assistance or overview from an expert in AI.
Persona Modeling
Persona modeling is basically a market research process. What is done here is that an AI agent will analyze scores of your company data, and your customers’ data (pulled from public records like social media posts) in order to create what are called “cognitive insights,” which are detailed rundowns of what your customers do and do not like and how they behave, along with other relevant information.
These cognitive insights can tackle big questions, like the ethics or political leanings of your customer base, or things as (deceptively) small as what colors or music your customers like the most.
Persona modeling also segments your customer base into basic categories, like heavy to lowest spenders, with details filling out each category, like the buying habits of each type of spender.
And, of course, there are the persona models themselves, which are fictional customer profiles that function like a composite of the most common types of people found in your customer base. Basically, these put a “face” to the cognitive insights and categories.
This information can be incredibly useful when crafting an advertisement, or even just a social media post, but what is important is that your marketing team is actually taking advantage of this information.
A business owner who wants to make good use of the cognitive insights and customer categories will not let persona modeling become a mere option for your marketing team, but will rather make it an integral part of your marketing strategy, which brings us to our next example of digital transformation.
TouchUp
Ever hear of “creative insurance?” If you are not ensuring that your marketing efforts are not founded on strong data, then you are lacking creative insurance.
TouchUp is an AI tool that provides you with creative insurance for your text or visual marketing efforts.
By drawing on cognitive insights that can be formed by a persona modeling tool, and other market research, TouchUp will analyze your planned advertisement and suggests edits based on data-driven predictions about where a customer may look first (then second, third, and onwards) in your ad—giving you a heads up as to how many glances it will take to get to your logo and product—, which colors will stick out to a customers and which will put them off, and the emotions that your ad will provoke in a viewer, among other things.
The same principle we espoused for persona modeling holds with TouchUp as well: You will only benefit from TouchUp if you make a good effort to incorporate it into your marketing strategy.
TouchUp draws on data that your marketing time may not have the time or ability to sift through, and should therefore be considered a valuable source. TouchUp’s rewrites or revisions of your advertisements ought to be considered seriously by your team, rather than a mere suggestion. If this is not the case, then you may be losing money when you take on TouchUp.
Summary
Digital transformation is everywhere in the business world, but so many businesses fail to take advantage of their own technological upgrades because they simply do not strategize accordingly. The key to making use of digital technologies like persona modeling or TouchUp is to make them integral to your company’s strategy. That way, your investment in digital technology will be money well spent.
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