On November 10, 2016 Prototype Interactive joined Microsoft and Progress (previously Sitefinity) at the Digital Transformation Conference. This summit offered professionals in the industry an opportunity to discuss digital innovation and how to better reach, engage and serve the online consumer. The event was a great success and this blog highlights the main takeaways from the day.
Digital Transformation Conference
This conference was designed to be a space for digital professionals to come together and discuss online digital innovation. There were five key areas that had significant weight throughout the day. We will explore each concept:
- Disruptive Marketing
Consumers online have become very resilient to traditional online messaging due to a very over-saturated market and recognisable practices. To combat this, companies are turning to disruptive marketing, the process by which companies innovate and pay close attention to the user experience to ensure the delivery of the right content, at the right moment. Disruptive marketing was a driving force behind many of the conversations at the conference, especially in relation to how companies have to change their business model to match this effort. Changing a business model can be a risk, but staying stagnant can be a bigger risk. By not staying on the cusp of innovation can put you in the same league as Kodak and Blockbuster - bankrupt. - Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a growing collection of integrated cloud services from Microsoft that include analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and web. The goal of offering such an integrated service is to help companies move faster, achieve more and save money. Kevin Ashby, Application Platform Product Manager at Microsoft did a fantastic presentation of the cloud-based services focused on how this service protects data, is flexible and smarter than its predecessors. - Progress Sitefinity
Grisha 'Greg' Karanikolov, a CMS consultant at Progress, gave a keynote surrounding the main concepts they follow at Progress to continue to innovate their service offering. - The Customer Experience: 'The customer's experience is at the heart of digital transformation.' Karanikolov encouraged the audience to understand where they are in the digital transformation journey? Knowing this information, how can you innovate to meet the needs of the customer in this part of their journey? Improving customer experience is the #1 priority for organizations and digital is the big focus in achieving this.
- Obstacles and Barriers to Innovation: Karanikolov discussed some of the key reasons companies become unsuccessful in achieving digital transformation:Lack of centralized strategy, Reliance on IT teams - IT and marketing has to work closely together in order to optimize the customer journeyCultural resistance Lack of digital skills.
- Digital Transformation: Karanikolov covered what he considered to be the main elements of the digital transformation. Easy content creation -> Business driven automation -> Industry leading mobility -> Optimize the customer journey -> Integration & Delivery -> Security & Compliance
- Security: We all know hosting a website or mobile application is important, however above that is the security of our details and data. It is everyone's responsibility to ensure data is secure and backed up in order to serve our customers better and more efficiently.
- Mobile App Development: It's all about mobile and keeping our mobile apps user friendly and engaging.
- NativeScript - NativeScript is a free, open source technology, that is easy to develop with JavaScript. It is a truly native experience. Once you build anything on NativeScript, you can deploy it on iOS and Android devices easy.
- The Future of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation tools exist to help make repetitive marketing tasks easier and automatic. As online processes become more and more complex, important tasks are left open to human error. Marketing automation tools helps to make these tasks easier as well remove any concern for error. Prototype Interactive's Elias hosted a presentation looking into different types of automation platforms and how to use them. - Why Digital & Social?
The final major highlight from the digital transformation conference was a discussion surrounding the relationship between digital and social and how we measure it through online tools. Each user online has a digital body language that is as complex as human body language, working in multiple different ways. This makes it extremely difficult for marketers because the sales process is spread throughout multiple digital and social channels. Tracking across channels and devices is yet to be a standard practice for most marketing professionals, yet it is a role that they are looking for an attribution tool to fill in a trustworthy and efficient way. The Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud was presented as a solution to this issue, a product recently released from Progress.
Want to learn more about the conference or interested in a digital transformation consultation? Give us a call or contact us here
Share this on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
