We gathered the 5 main steps of digital transformation here to give you an insight into where you need to start and what you need to pay attention to on your way forward.

Step #1: Scalable research

The first step would be to conduct thorough and scalable market research. Market research used to be kind of difficult to scale, as a research specialist needed to physically run the research on focus groups in your target markets. This practice can still bring results, yet digital research is much faster and helps you collect data in a more scalable way. Conducting market research before anything else ensures that you start in the right direction and you don’t waste time and money on something that might look appealing on your end, but the market just wouldn’t engage with it.

Step #2: Strategy

The second step would be to build a strategy. Some practical advice is to think in the long term, but not longer than 12 months in the first phase. The digital world is fast, really fast, and getting faster by the day. That’s why many marketers and executives think that digital transformation initiatives will produce immediate results. But they are wrong. Powerful digitalization requires a lot of hard work and attention to detail. You should have at least a 3-year vision about where you are heading, but your to-do list in your first operative strategy shouldn’t be longer than 12 months. Technologies and channels rise and fall as we speak, and you want to be agile enough to adopt new elements whenever it is necessary. If you are a decision-maker at a larger corporation, normally, you shouldn’t expect to see meaningful results before the first year.

Step #3: Human brand voice

Business environments are considered by many to be emotionless, strict, and super formal. While the back office works like that many times, your communication with your audience should embrace emotions. With the upswing of digital, the noise in marketing is also growing massively. Therefore, people started to build a sort of immunity towards marketing efforts, so it’s getting a lot harder to grab someone’s attention. Your voice in digital will fade away unless you differentiate yourself. Even though we talk about digitalization, the era of human-to-human marketing is rising. It may sound like a paradox, but it isn’t. Digitalization is the methodology, but your brand voice, your messages, and your communication should be emotional and hyper-personalized and connect people behind your brand with people from your audience. So as a third step, think of developing a digital voice that sounds human.

Step #4: Digital technology

Step four would be applying digital technology to your business. When undergoing a digital transformation, it may seem like people from every direction are trying to push their miracle digital products on you. The bad news is that there is not one product that can cover all your digital business needs. Having said that, the good news is that you don’t necessarily have to cover all your needs, at least not in the beginning. Rather than finding the perfect tools, you should draw the diagram of your digital ecosystem first. It’s likely that you are already using some tools, for instance, social media. Try to think about how these tools are connected. Instead of looking at them as single vertices, connect the dots. Think of what else might still be missing in terms of audience information. Is it their job experience? Is it their product interest? Try to fill in the gaps. Once you have a diagram similar to the one here, you are ready to start exploring the digital tools that can help you build your ecosystem.

Whatever your findings are about the digital tools you’re going to need, my advice is to not choose a single vendor. Try to get a neutral perspective from experts who don’t get a commission on selling different solutions that might not even fit your needs.

Step #5: Execution

Last but not least, there is the fifth step: execution. You can have the best strategy in the world supported by the best tools, but if the implementation phase goes wrong, you just wasted money and time, and you are back to square one. So how do you avoid a meaningless loop? Well, there are a few things you can do.

First, have an operative strategy and live by it. For this, you need to have your project’s to-do list clearly defined on a monthly and weekly basis together with your key milestones and deliverables.

Second, avoid shared responsibilities; only define personal responsibilities. It's of critical importance to know who is responsible for what right at the start of your project. This way, you will be able to skip “the pointing fingers” phase where people delegate the one thing that they shouldn’t, being responsible. Remember, shared responsibility equals to no responsibility.

And third, be consistent and follow up: have a monthly overview with strategic stakeholders (60-90 min.), weekly conference calls with project managers (15-30 min.), and encourage project managers to have a daily stand-up call on their end in order to keep things up-to-date (5-10 min.).

Final Thoughts

Digital transformation is not a one-off task; it’s an ongoing journey that requires clarity, agility, and consistency. By following these five steps, businesses can build a solid foundation for innovation and adapt quickly to future changes without losing momentum or direction.