We live in dynamic times characterized by rapid development of technology. People and businesses must respond to the fact that technology is increasingly penetrating our lives every day. There is no need to be afraid of digital transformation, though. It can be quite a simple process when you start with small steps.

Greater competitiveness, flexibility, and swiftness are the definite benefits of digitalization. With a well-executed digital transformation, companies can use modern tools to improve their ability to adapt to market changes, such as new fashion trends or such an unpredictable event as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Flexibility allows a company to grow more easily or, conversely, to effectively reduce its operating costs during a downturn. Customers will appreciate the comfort and swiftness that digital transformation brings. A managed digital strategy allows the customer to obtain relevant information faster and just when he needs it. This will reduce his dependence on personal advice at the branch, by phone or e-mail.

It is necessary to realize that customers are already adapting to the digital age, speeding up communication with each other, using social networks, and expecting the same from companies. Customers don't think about digital transformation but expect it to happen.

How to start with digital transformation?

Speaking about business, digital transformation could be applied to all processes - sales and customer care, internal communication, company operations, HR, and other areas of the company's operations. That's why it is always important to start with defining what to digitize. Ask yourself, why this, and what would it bring to your business. This applies to sales, marketing, or operations.

Once you know what to digitize, plan the initial steps. The steps should be clearly defined and as small as possible. The smaller the steps you take, the easier the digitization will be, and you will also be able to avoid unpleasant surprises.

For example, if you have a brick-and-mortar store and would like to start offering your goods in an e-shop, there is no reason to start building the extensive and expensive platform that giant established e-shops with tens of thousands of customers have. Start by trying to find a marketplace to help you solve logistics, storage control, etc. After a while, you'll see if the first step has worked. If customers buy your products online, now it's time to move to the next step and start building your own e-commerce solution.

A custom solution allows you to continue to improve your services. Thanks to customer data, your company will be able to adapt your content and communication to be as relevant as possible for customers. The data will let you set up your products and help you to increase granularity in your product portfolio so that each customer receives exactly what he needs.

The most important thing is to choose the right tool

To keep digital transformation running smoothly, the next step is to choose the right tool. While choosing, find out how long it takes to implement the tool. Be aware that with some tools it can be months! And you certainly don't want to wait for that.

Samba can be implemented by simply copying the code. So, the first results do not come in months, but hours. Wondering what Samba can manage? There's a lot of things. Samba even won an Effie marketing award for its work for IKEA, represented by Adexpres media agency.

Thanks to efficient automation and a combination of offline and online data, Samba helped IKEA to know the customers even better. Artificial intelligence also reflected a change in customer behavior over time. Thus, Samba's predictive model was able to improve both the basic metrics and the overall performance of the campaign. With the saved money and time, IKEA could have various marketing business hypotheses automatically evaluated, which helped to further increase efficiency. As a result, total sales increased by 24% and cost per conversion decreased by 30%.

So as you can see, great things can happen when you start small to big.

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