Regardless of the size of your business, it's evident that your target market seeks convenience when they interact with your brand's digital experience.
What does that mean?
It means that people expect that they will find what they're looking for easily and securely across any possible channel or touchpoint.
This isn't just about your website - it's about your entire digital presence on the web. Especially if you're an enterprise-level business with a global audience with a rich array of products and services on offer.
Our team is specialized in developing engaging enterprise-level digital experiences and through our own experience guiding enterprises in their early stages of digital transformation, we gathered the most vital decisions that will help your enterprise secure its digital investment.
1. Choosing the Ideal Technology
The biggest hurdle that enterprises face when it comes to digital transformation is the leadership decision-making process. What will our business, market, and industry look like in the next 5 years? How do we need to adapt to ensure we sustain and grow our own business? What does our target market expect of us?
Leadership often struggles with drafting a clear plan and vision for their digital transformation - which eventually leads to interrupted much-needed change.
From our point of perspective, the most relevant issue to discuss here is the fact that leadership lacks the required technical knowledge when it comes to identifying the ideal technology and CMS to enable their business to transform into a high-performance digital experience.
Our decade-long experience and expertise in enabling digital transformation have proven that businesses with enterprise-level operations are nothing like your typical website.
An enterprise must become an interconnected ecosystem of components, platforms, touchpoints, and apps that their global audiences can access securely via any device or technology (i.e. voice search, smartwatch) out there.
Not all technologies can deliver such complex digital experiences with various essential integrations without compromising performance, relevant support, and best practices.
Drupal has long been identified as a leading technology when it comes to developing multilingual, multisite digital experiences that focus on enterprise needs - and is increasingly being relied upon by global brands and organizations around the world that want to build the best of the web.
2. Plan for Ongoing Personalization
A typical enterprise will also have multiple products, services, or even brands that must each have a personalized UX/UI journey mapped out for a global and diverse audience - which ideally means that your business must develop a digital presence dedicated to each brand or service.
Enterprises realize that personalization is no longer an option.
Industry reports have long confirmed that people would rather purchase or engage with a brand that is relevant to their needs and speaks their language. The best experiences are those that feature ongoing personalization as the user journey evolves.
The challenges of ongoing personalization are also very real.
The amount of content that needs to be created, updated, edited, localized, duplicated, etc. The languages and translations alone can be a nightmare in terms of effort and time wasted. To build a dedicated website for each audience, product, service, or brand is extremely expensive in terms of development, support required, teams and resources to manage them, etc.
Enterprises such as Fitness First found the answer to building a personalized journey for each of their diverse target audiences in Drupal. Drupal was designed to create engaging digital experiences for your website visitors, but also to optimize your resources and enhance the performance of your marketing and technical teams.
Instead of hiring a dedicated team of technical and marketing professionals for each platform, your enterprise can benefit from Drupal's multisite functionalities and solutions to build multiple websites managed by a centralized enterprise CMS.
All platforms and websites will share the best practices when it comes to performance, SEO, security, accessibility, GDPR, and responsive design.
3. Optimize All Users' Experience
We aren't talking about your customer experience here.
Users include everyone involved from your side of the business as well. Users can be site builders, marketers, content creators, and editors.
Unlike a typical website, enterprises have various departments to support their intense content marketing and communication strategies. Their combined efforts need coordination to ensure that their almost non-stop and content-heavy publishing requirements and workflow is uninterrupted and doesn’t negatively hinder the performance or user experience.
Drupal enables enterprise-level content publishing and marketing through a clear and seamless content publishing workflow process based on tiered permissions and roles.
Your marketers will also be able to update, edit, or even create more personalized customer experiences thanks to the ability to quickly create personalized landing pages to enhance conversions and engagement via Drupal's Layout Builder without much technical expertise needed. Built-in translation tools that enable them to translate all their content to any spoken language imaginable (optimized for search engines) in a matter of seconds.
Drupal helps you save money where necessary and enables your marketing and technical team to create and publish richer content faster than ever.
4. Eliminate Silos. Integrate.
Your business and team undoubtedly depend on a variety of essential tools that enable them to achieve their objectives.
Many enterprises rely upon marketing automation, email marketing, payment gateways, CRMs, and often - custom APIs, which have proven to be of strategic importance to their business.
These critical integrations are often misaligned with the legacy technology being used by the enterprise which creates a very challenging and taxing management process for the teams forced to work in silos. - especially if they were running on multiple websites and CMSs.
Real digital transformation is by definition a culture change that focuses on optimizing internal processes in a bid to reflect a superior user experience for your customers - that is why choosing a CMS and technology that can integrate with all needed solutions and technologies seamlessly is essential.
Most of our clients have preferred Drupal due to its ability to easily integrate with all critical integrations and 3rd party apps in the market. The ability to integrate all the necessary solutions with a centralized CMS made their lives so much easier when it comes to ongoing management, and upgrades.
Speaking of upgrades...
5. Secure Your Long-Term Business Goals
After you've settled on the ideal technology needed to ensure you can build a foundation for an enterprise digital experience and all the complex technical requirements that must be addressed, it's time for the most important aspect of ensuring sustained digital business growth.
Ongoing support, enhancements, and upgrades.
In recent years, this essential phase of digital experience development was often overlooked by enterprises because they believed that all you need is a website to run an effective business in an increasingly digital world and market. That belief was quickly shattered with the rise of challenges like the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The sudden surge of traffic and demand by people for digital experiences such as remote and distance learning from schools exposed the fragility of the IT infrastructure of many global organizations and businesses in the market.
The truth is, pandemic or not, ongoing enhancements must always be made to ensure that your business keeps up with technologies disrupting your industry and evolving demands of the digital consumer.
Drupal is the ideal technology because it's open-source. What does that mean?
It means that there is a massive global community of expert developers that are working around the clock to ensure that Drupal is maintained and improved. You will never need to worry about outdated modules or features - as this community of passionate software engineers is working around the clock to bring automated updates and improvements for all stakeholders involved.
You may have lost your IT support partner or vendor due to the impact of COVID-19 on their business or ability to provide consistent support, but with Drupal, you will always find the open-source community ready to provide essential support whenever required.
To recap, you need to invest wisely in a technology like Drupal which will enable you to sustain your evolution and growth as a business. It will be the most essential step to ensure you achieve the real digital transformation that aligns with the future of your brand, market, and industry.
Consider all the complexities and integrations that are essential to your customer experience - all the tools required by your marketing team such as marketing automation to consistently be able to publish and push relevant messaging in front of the target audience.
Global enterprises with global audiences such as universities, governments, and multilingual e-commerce giants choose Drupal as their preferred technology and CMS precisely because it was designed to support enterprise-grade digital projects and enable sustainable digital transformation efforts.