I have a passion for digital communications, and am very lucky that I spend my days working with digital clients and helping people in my (online) communities get their dream digital communications jobs.This has allowed me an "insiders" view of the marketplace, so  in my third and final blog, I look at how digital communications fits into the grander digital picture.

In my last two blogs, I looked at the importance of digital technologies in empowering businesses, and how businesses can develop their digital maturity, based on the findings in CapGemini's fantastic 'The Digital Advantage' report.

When you look at how these Digital Digerati behave, they demonstrate a focused approach in a few domains of excellence that include Social Media, Customer Experience, Mobile Channels, and Internal Collaboration.

Communicators: this is our territory!

Getting your digital communications on

When it comes to customer facing processes like social media and the customer experience, this is where we as communicators can really demonstrate our value.

Looking at the objectives of your business and how you connect with customers and other companies will put you on the right road in developing a robust Social Media offering. You can use these tools to monitor and develop your business reputation, promote and sell goods and services, provide innovative ways to support your customer service model and build exciting and engaged customer and business communities.

You can also help influence Customer Experience. Ensure your cross-channel communications and marketing is constant, to share a strong business voice out there in the wider world. Indeed, ensure  customers are able to personalise the experience too - this can be simple tricks like ensuring they see most commonly purchased products when they visit your website, or sending tickets in a smart-phone friendly way. Self service is incredibly powerful too, and you can leverage this to keep customer service costs down.

Getting your Mobile content right is also key. As people are spending more time on their mobiles and tablets than ever before, it's crucial that your communications offering shapes up on mobile devices, and allows users to interact with your business in the way they'd expect. Mobile provides another exciting platform to promote and sell products and services too, whether this is off the back of social media channels, location services, a well designed mobile website, or even bespoke mobile apps.

Moving onto operational processes, the subject of Internal Collaboration will resonate with those internal communicators among you. There are many digital platforms such as Intranets or Enterprise Social Networks (social media platforms for inside a business) that provide incredibly powerful collaboration tools for your workforce, so long as the business understands how to get the most from them. Indeed, digital platforms allow us to share video and rich content not just externally but internally, providing new and engaging ways of sharing your business objectives, news, training and change programs.

Keeping the digital momentum going

Building strong digital communications within your business will go a long way in help demonstrate the power and usefulness of the digital business model, while building your digital maturity and helping the business identify room for further growth.

Measurement is key and you should ensure that before you set out on your digital communications journey, that you align what you do with business objectives and measurable outcomes. Quantify and monitor progress throughout the change, and ensure you iterate and improve. This way it's easy to demonstrate the wins you make with your new social media presence, your internal video sharing, or new mobile website, to secure the resource and develop the next digital ambition.

And you're not alone. There are many digital communications professionals contributing an incredible amount to their business' digital maturity, even if sometimes the business itself doesn't always realise it. If you're a digital professional yourself and would like to talk more about your own digital communications plans, with myself or indeed VMA GROUP's community of digital communicators.

Keep your mind on the goals; Digirati are statistically significantly more profitable than their competitors, and the markets reward them. And every company in every industry already has competitors who are Digirati.

As a communicator in your business, you have a fantastic opportunity to develop your digital toolkit, demonstrate to the business how digital can revolutionise your model and reap the rewards of Digital Digerati stardom.

The journey starts here.

To find out more about how we can help you develop your career in digial communications or marketing, click here. Or, if you are interested in finding out about how we can help you hire the best talent into your team, click here. 

Also read:

Let’s Get Digital 1/3: Let’s Get Digital… Digital…

Let’s Get Digital 2/3: Growing Pains – Developing Digital Maturity