COVID-19 has surely had an impact on your media business and the reality is that the entire business world has evolved – and quickly. Your organization may have lost some opportunities in your sales pipeline due to tightening budgets or you have been forced to furlough some talented employees, so starting a new project may seem like a plan better suited for another time.

The fact is, businesses that are investing in digital infrastructure are best positioned to succeed in difficult situations. So, if you are overwhelmed with the new reality of selling media, the important part is getting started because creating the proper digital infrastructure doesn’t have to be complex!

While so many parts of your business are changing, right now is the perfect time to begin, or reignite, your digital transformation for six key reasons:

1. Start small and scale

Start with the essentials. If you are still using disparate tools like spreadsheets and emails to manage sales and service, or haven’t connected downstream tools like ad serving platform, then you may already be struggling to keep up with the changes and could be missing out on new opportunities.

While there are countless ways you can digitize, automate, and streamline your business processes, getting started can be as simple as ensuring your sales teams can wrap their arms around the current pipeline and manage any existing client requests. Standing up a solution to manage your sales pipeline will give you better insight into your revenues while enabling your teams to better serve existing clients.

From here you can build a journey to scale and build the solutions that your business needs at a speed that makes sense for your unique challenges today and down the road. 

2. Single source of truth

One of the most important benefits of digital transformation is the fact that you can create a centralized location for all of the customer data, campaign data, relationship data, and more. Centralized data empowers your employees with access to the important information they need, when they need it, from anywhere.

Placing the right data in front of your teams empowers them to quickly take action to avoid backlogs, and most importantly, make your customers happy – especially in times of crisis. 

3. Personalized Communications

In times of crisis, communication is one of the most powerful tools your business still has and, if it is used effectively, can build the customer loyalty you need right now. While your business needs to avoid radio silence, proper audience segmentation is the only way to ensure the right message gets to the right end-user. 

While many businesses have put advertising on hold, customers, partners, resellers and more want updates, inspiration and helpful content to keep them going. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is designed to help you do just that.

With the right infrastructure, your business can continue to communicate with customers from their preferred channels. This means you can keep the conversation going and the trust maintained. While your tone and voice have no doubt changed, building campaigns to let your customers know you are there to help will go a long way when we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

4. Remove bottlenecks to improve efficiency

The new virtual business reality has thrown a wrench into many of our business processes. While many people are adapting to their remote working environment, they are probably also experiencing some new hurdles in acquiring and sharing information and Salesforce can help solve this problem without much heavy lifting.

Take your sales teams for example. With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can improve the flow of information and improve productivity for everyone involved in a new sales opportunity. With relative ease (and the right consulting partner!), you can have your Salesforce instance set-up to standardize the processes, automate manual tasks, notify the right users and enable your teams to access data on any device, from anywhere.

5. Sales, service & support expectations have changed

COVID-19 turned the spotlight on communications for everyone, but the fact is that sales, service, and support have all dramatically changed in the past decade. Customers today engage with your brand(s) in a variety of channels and you need to ensure you are listening and positioned to respond.

Take social media for example. With Salesforce Social Studio you can automatically monitor social media for engagement and sentiment trends around your brand(s). Salesforce would then notify you about negative response trends to particular ad creative for you or one of your clients. This could automatically trigger a support case ticket, notify the right team members of the negative response sentiment and empower your team to develop a timely response or proactive recommendation to your client.

6. Machine learning & artificial intelligence

You have probably heard about the value of machine learning and artificial intelligence more times than you care to think about, but the reality is that your competition is probably using it to try and get ahead of you.

Businesses have been storing terabytes worth of our customer data in various locations but most haven’t harnessed its power. Today it is easier than ever to connect millions of data points to start gaining useful insights and recommendations to optimize everything from campaign delivery, product bundling, upselling, and even financial projections and reporting.

Platforms like Salesforce Einstein Analytics are ready-built tools to start modeling your data from the moment you turn it on and begin the flow of data. You can connect every data source into a single location to start pulling insights and real recommendations to move your business forward.

Regardless of where you are, now is the right time to (re)start your digital transformation we are here to help!