It’s becoming increasingly important to not only keep on top of technological advancements, but figure out how best to harness these advancements to improve your customers' brand experience. The ultimate aim of any digital transformation initiative should always be the strengthening of your company’s brand identity.

You can begin to enhance your brand identity by using three important factors to set your digital transformation efforts in motion: agile technology, AI for a better user experience, and forming productive CIO relationships.

Select The Right Agile Technology

CMOs must empower their employees with technology. Today there is no better path to success. Thoroughly research any technology you plan to introduce to your teams because for your digital transformation efforts to have any chance of success, they must be the right choice for achieving your specific business goals.

An agile technology that is right for your company will offer these features:

• Your team should able to create campaigns, update promotions, and share content, effortlessly.
• The results of their daily tasks should be immediately apparent without any outside IT support.
• Tasks that are fundamental to your teams should be ready out of the box, and integrations quick, simple, and reliable.
• Custom software should be quickly built and reliable to use.
• The technology should allow work to be shared smoothly across channels and devices to ensure brand integrity and enhanced customer experience.
• Agile technology should manage complex workflows automatically.

Use AI to Enhance User Experience

Businesses are turning to AI for the creation of seamless, personalized user experiences. In fact, it’s becoming a top priority in today’s age of modern commerce. Users are becoming accustomed to quick and easy access to channels that allow them to carry out a task with minimum intervention from a third party. Increasingly, perceptions of your brand are being based on the simplest of user experiences.

Keep in mind that user experience begins within the walls of your company. Research suggests that consumers trust just 55% of marketing content released by brands. Experience is showing that employees are well-positioned to act as the bridge between a company and its customers. So, begin at home, by creating user experiences for your employees that put them in the right frame of mind to promote your brand with passion and belief.

This can be as simple as moving your branded merchandise program with all its out-of-stock and clumsy Excel spreadsheet headaches, to a system of digital merchandising. An online company store, with the help of the right partner, can be built in a way that works for your company, is easy for everyone to use, streamlines processes, and maintains brand integrity.

Form CIO Partnerships

Too often, digital transformation initiatives fail because little effort has been put into building a solid partnership between the CMO and the CIO. The bottomline is that today CMOs need the support of the CIO to connect internal systems that translate into customer experience and brand performance. The quality of data mining and sharing is increasingly determining the success of marketing digital transformation, along with the CMO’s ability to respond agily to customers changing needs. For this reason, it’s critical for CMOs and CIOs to build strong, working relationships that allow them to work together to imagine, leverage and deploy new technologies to create competitive advantage for a brand.

Digital transformation that leverages technology to bring your brand to the minds of new prospects and deliver seamless and meaningful experiences for current customers, is the single most important tool a CMO has. Incorporating an online store into your brand can help enhance your digital transformation efforts. Contact us to give you more insight into the future of shopping.

Proforma Durkee is the online company store expert. Their best-in-class workflow technology platform and more than 500 contracted partners, continue to ensure that 40,000+ online company stores get the most out of their branded merchandise programs for as little time and money as possible. If you’re ready to discuss creating an online store for your company, please contact us and let's chat. For more information about the benefits on an online company store, you can download our free infographic, The future of corporate branding is digital, that explores topics like easy reporting, brand consistency, inventory control, automated workflow, and budget control.