Digital People were proud to support Arco as they embarked on their 'digital first' transformation
For some, ‘transformation’ may be relatively simple – such as establishing a digital presence and getting the digital foundations in place. For others, it could mean re-platforming to provide greater levels of functionality for customers, or playing catch-up with new and disruptive market entrants, and the need to react rapidly to changing customer demands in order to protect market share.
For mature businesses reliant on traditional marketing channels such as direct mail, or used to selling through catalogues with hundreds of thousands of SKU’s in multiple languages, transformation can represent a wholesale change in the way a business takes its product or service to market. This can necessitate the need to re-train or re-role internal teams with a ‘digital first’ focus and, in doing so, divesting or reducing reliance on expensive, less effective or less measurable media in favour of highly trackable digital channels that can accurately measure return on investment.
Ultimately, whatever the size of business and wherever it sits on the transformation scale, its about building a business growth strategy that will enable you to capitalise on, and take advantage of new opportunities created by emerging technologies or channels, to increase agility and efficiency, and to meet changing customer demands and expectations. The key questions to ask when forming your strategy are, is the product or service you sell changing? Is the way you sell your product or service changing? Or is it your business and its processes that needs to change?
Whichever way, there is no magic bullet when it comes to transformation, but those that fail to react to market conditions and refuse to embrace change, risk certain demise. Examples of successful businesses that no longer exist after their failure to transform, and that could have otherwise dominated their market online, include the much cited Blockbuster & Toys R Us.

Competing in an ‘always on’ world
The challenge for businesses competing online has never been greater. The consumer today has more choice about when, where and how they consume brand content than ever before – and this means companies need to be everywhere their customers are, all the time.
But aside from the budget required to compete with the big players, by far the biggest challenge for publishers in today’s ‘always on, always visible and always optimised’ Google mantra-world, is securing the talent with the right skills and experience, capable of managing these ever-evolving channels, new tech and ever-increasing marketing budgets.
A January 2016 government report, Digital Skills for the UK Economy, found that as demand for digital skills already outstripped supply, significant technological trends will continue to emerge. According to the World Economic Forum, new roles will emerge through breakthroughs in fields such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing.
Add the implications of Brexit to the equation and demand for cyber security and data protection specialists increases significantly. Before a Brexit referendum was on the table, the government estimated that our digital market would grow at a rate of 5.4% by 2020, with an additional 1.4m digital workers required over five years to meet market demand.
Digital technologies are considered as a key driver in boosting innovation and productivity in the UK. The government believes “digital transformation can make every business in every sector more productive, wherever they are located”. Its research found that “small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) with a strong web presence, on average, grow more than twice as quickly as those with minimal or no presence, export twice as much, and create twice as many jobs”. And that’s just the basics.
Yet with a clear skills gap in the sector, an even greater challenge exists for candidates of digital transformation – finding talent that not only has the right ‘hard skills’ and experience, who understand what good Paid Search, SEO or e-Commerce looks like, but who also has the right ‘soft skills’ required to build relationships with key stakeholders. They need to be able to build effective business cases to secure buy-in from business sponsors and influence leadership – and perhaps most importantly, remain sensitive to those in the ‘old world’ who are naturally sceptical about the new order, and the fear of the unknown that digital can bring.
Digital transformation requires talent that can spearhead change, at the same time as winning hearts and minds and taking everyone on the journey with them – and in time turning the biggest digital cynics, into the biggest digital advocates. 
That’s real transformation.