The 9 biggest roadblocks in the enterprise digital journey

Every new initiative brings with it new challenges,which companies need to conquer to gain a competitive edge. Some key challenges faced by organizations on their road to digital transformation include:

1. Secure Platform: Many customer segments are still apprehensive about security around new technologies. To address this issue, several companies are ensuring that all products are fully secure. Additionally, these firms are also educating customers to bring them under the digital fold.

2. Bandwidth Challenge: As a country, we still face data bandwidth challenges and this is a limiting factor in providing a superior digital experience across different platforms. However, with connectivity improving and 3G and 4G options emerging, there is a hope

3. Lack of Experts: The biggest challenge that many business leaders face

is the absence of a complete digital team consisting of experienced professionals from IT to creative content writers, graphic designers, and digital marketing managers, who can understand the market and the behavior of customers.

4. Understanding the Audience and Shortlisting the Channels of Use: Audience behavior is continuing to evolve and adapt to new technologies at a ferocious rate. Expectations are changing and people are interacting with brands in new ways and on new platforms using new devices and hence one of the biggest challenges today is to choose the most effective channel for the target audience. This would require a complete change in the culture and need the organization to be agile and nimble.

5. Cost and Budget: Digital marketing campaigns are quite different because they deal with building relationships with the customer. This requires long term efforts and building trust. Allocation of the right budget into the right channels helps in getting the desired results.

6. Content: Branded content isn’t new, and is expected to continue its upward trend. Brands need to concentrate on producing content that aligns with their core values. Content is of pivotal importance in digital channels but many organizations are still failing to exploit their content’s full potential and are instead focusing unduly on their owned platforms instead of using different paid, owned, and earned media touch points.

7. Analytics, Metrics, and RoI: Digital marketing and its associated tactics are still new and quite different from the traditional channels of marketing. It may be very difficult for brands to know the right metrics to use and how to get a good return on investment (RoI) using these metrics. What is important is to analyze data because it tells you where the traffic comes from (age group, geographical area, gender, etc). This helps organizations to learn which products and promotions attract consumers by looking at the purchasing habits of visitors.

8. Duplicacy: Proliferation, duplication, and piracy of content is another crucial area that needs stringent digital measures. Currently, this is handled at an individual platform level and there is no centralized diktat that covers content owners from such issues.

9. Being Real Time: Whatever you do as a brand, whether it is to answer a grievance, a query, a product quest or even a contest response, everything needs to be real time and fast. The online consumer is impatient and expects a response instantly.

If the above challenges overwhelm your organization, it is time to outsource your digital needs or call upon digital experts to transform existing processes.

It also makes sense to outsource if your digital budget exceeds due to increased overhead costs from platform vendors and higher salaried experts required to complete projects. In some cases, it may be a simple case of upgrading your website, as it has been found out that the digital marketing team misses deadlines because of an antiquated web platform.