"What is your biggest digital challenge?" That's the question we at WUA posed to 25 digital professionals working in healthcare, telecom, energy, retail and travel industries, as well as the financial sector. The interviewees are all winners: they are responsible for the digital domains of companies that came out on top in our research over the past year.
In total, we asked the interviewees the same six questions each time, about mindset, innovation, digital roadmaps, sales and service, and customer research. This creates an interesting state of affairs about digital marketing and research in practice: We have bundled the answers to those questions and the interviews in The Digital Excellence Challenge, a book we officially launched last month.
The 10 biggest digital challenges
Even winners have their digital challenges, difficulties and issues they really have to fight for to make happen. They also have a dream, a dot on the horizon that might seem unattainable or very far away. We have summarized 10 major digital challenges from the 23 interviews, with many more in the book. The list below is not based on priority: it's a representation of the common thread in the responses.
1 Human resources
How do you attract and retain the digital unicorns – preferably marketers – with five legs? Finding good digital all-rounders and keeping them as an organization is a challenge that was mentioned by multiple interviewees.
2 Translating 100% customer satisfaction to the individual
Making the transition from one-size-fits-all customer friendliness to one-on-one customer friendliness based on data. Personalization is a hot topic, clearly high on the priority list, especially in the telecom world.
3 Marketing technology: Conversion attribution
Which campaign or touchpoint should a conversion be attributed to when people have been influenced by multiple touchpoints? Conversion attribution is a digital 'problem' that has been around much longer and is therefore still hot.
4 Thinking in terms of journeys instead of marketing channels
What do customer journeys look like and which (media) channels are most relevant during specific journeys?
5 Ultimate backlog management
Prioritizing all the good ideas you've gathered based on research to create the ultimate user experience.
6 Providing relevance through content
If you have a website with more than 1500 pages, how do you help people find the gems? It's about relevance and speed of searching and finding, and not wanting to tell too much.
7 Reaching your target audience in a fragmented media landscape
Media behavior is shifting tremendously: through Netflix and time-shifted TV viewing, but also through ad blockers, it's complicated to reach your target audience.
8 Efficient deployment of new marketing technology
There are an enormous amount of tools you can deploy as a marketer, but how do you do that yourself without it costing too much money and time? Should you want to do everything yourself or is it smarter to work with specialized agencies to make the biggest digital impact?
9 Mapping the digital customer experience
Insight and knowledge: What do people experience during their customer journey and how exactly do they experience your website?
10 Online performance influenced by offline branding
How can you properly get REAL control over the influence that offline marketing and branding have on the online channel?
