digital principles (to see you through the bravado and bull).

Our world is changing fast, super fast. Google’s new D.Wave quantum computer is 100 million times faster than your home PC. 100 million times faster! Exciting but also daunting. Change is happening so quickly, and there's so much demanding our time and attention. How can you possibly know what's important to your business, and what's not? It's tempting to simply ignore everything or chase the latest trend but don't. Technology is finally hitting a stage where it adds significant value to customers (think one click purchase) and your back office, making things simpler and cheaper.
Here are my guiding principles to help you see your way through the clutter and confusion, the shiny and new, the bravado and the bull to unfold the growth potential of your business:

1. Start where you are - sounds obvious but you'll be surprised how many businesses have got no idea where they currently sit. Take stock. Benchmark how you're performing. If you improve 1% each day (& there's much more than that to be had) in 70 days you'll be twice as good as you were.
2. It's not about the [insert any tech here eg CRM, social media, viral video, content, website]. It's the sum of all the parts, how they integrate and how you get them working together - people, process and tech. It's an ecosystem integrated into your business. You may have a best in class CRM system but if it's not integrated properly into your organisation (how many companies are on their 3rd CRM?) and no one is using it, what's the point?
3. Set specific (business) goals and a timeframe. Like the back of ‘fag packet’ calculations salesmen make, you need business goals to work back from. Then you can break down the steps with smaller goals, and roll those back up to your main business goal. Without these you’ll never be truly integrating technology into your business. It will remain an add on.
4. It always has been, and always will be about the customer. That hasn't changed. Still think customer first. Don't get caught focusing on internal systems and processes, they follow. Think about your customers. Who are they? Think about their journey and where you add value. Build your world around them. What questions or concerns do they have? What are they searching for? How can you help make their life easier?
5. 80% of the tech you need is free (or pay as you grow). Chances are you don't need to leap in with a big +$100k investment in tech. Especially as you're going to be building an ecosystem with a number of components, integration with existing processes and your team. Don't try and sprint straight off. Crawl, walk, run, then sprint. $10k maybe more than enough to kickoff. Then scale over time once you know what you need, it delivers ROI and the team know how to use it.
6. Roadmap your way forward. Plans change, they always do but you need a plan leading back to your business goals. With so many demands on your time and resources it’s more important than ever to know what to do (& why), what not to do (& why) and where there's some opportunity for some magic. You'll evolve the plan as you go but you and your team will always know what you’re doing and why.
7. Test and measure everything - growth isn't hit or miss, it's a science. We've got the data. Test your assumptions, messaging, frequency, timing and channels. There's still a huge need for creativity but test it early and let customers pick the winner. Every business should understand the levers they've got available to drive growth. By breaking everything down into bite size pieces in your roadmap, you will be able to see precisely what levers are working and to what degree. You can remove waste, double down on what's working and rework your roadmap based on your learnings.
8. Go quickly but don't rush. Technology today allows almost everything to be live tested - messaging, content, frequency, channels, journeys. Testing is now part of the process. So you A/B test an email 10% receive A, 10% receive B and then 80% receive the best performing version A or B. There’s minimal delay but the testing stage can double or triple your performance levels.
9. It's never going to be finished. Tactics like Marketing Automation and Programmatic Advertising sound attractive. There's an implicit promise of ‘set and forget’ performance but they're far from it. There’s considerable time spent setting up these tools, they require constant tweaking, they link to other parts of your ecosystem and they require ‘feeding’ eg content. Crawl, walk, run, sprint but you'll need to keep moving forward.
10. JFDI