Key digital opportunities you shouldn't miss in 2020

The digital world remains focused on the challenges that organizations face. At the same time, these challenges often present opportunities. Digital opportunities provide a chance to have a true impact on your organization’s core business. We’ll be taking an in-depth look at how businesses are using technology for growth in 2020.

Retaining the overview is difficult, but crucial

Businesses are looking for more than just a website. They need a partner that can guide them throughout their entire digital journey. This journey starts with an intelligently designed digital strategy. All subsequent stages - from user experience to implementation and optimization - are aimed at executing on this strategy. The number of tools and data keeps on growing, which makes it harder for organizations to stay in control and maintain a clear overview. That is why businesses are focusing on new ways to take back control of their tools and data.

With laws and regulations becoming more severe, smart data strategies are key. This is the only way for organizations to optimize the use of their data and technology.

Whilst 2019’s digital trends keep developing, we can distinguish four main opportunities for 2020: customer experiences, artificial intelligence, data and connected platforms.

1 - Customer experience: connect with your customers

Consumers use a variety of different digital channels, and they expect the same from the brands they want to interact with. 96% of consumers expect brands to respond to their questions within 24 hours. This presents an opportunity to create a personal connection with customers and generate new leads. The resulting customer intimacy covers a broad spectrum.

It is entirely possible to build valuable digital relationships with all stakeholders. This doesn’t only cover customers, suppliers and partners, but also interviewees and employees - the latter through employer branding.

Smart use of your digital channels leads to competitive advantage. Gathering customer data allows you to tailor your services even further. You have to make sure that your employees across different business units have the correct information available when interacting with customers. Successful digital interaction relies on the following key principles:

• All of your digital platforms have to be connected.
   
• Data should be linked to centralized customer profiles.
   
• Digital strategyand UXare the backbone of all practical implementation.
   
• Optimization never stops. Increase traffic through SEO, improve your personalization, keep adding digital features and add customer touchpoints. Information-only websites no longer cut it for your customers.

2 - Artificial Intelligence: AI is finding its way to SMEs

In 2019, Flemish minister for Digital Agenda Alexander de Croo was quoted saying that “AI will continue its rise in the SME world”.

As AI has found firm footing in the marketing departments of large multinational companies, it is becoming increasingly popular with smaller organizations.

A global survey by McKinsey showed that early adopters of AI notice a positive impact, both in terms of turnover increase and cost reduction. Marketing and sales departments see the most benefit to AI.

As much as 80% of respondents managed to realize a turnover increase of 5% or more through smart use of artificial intelligence. Whilst AI seems far on the horizon to most SMEs, our customers already have the chance to benefit from the opportunities it provides. In the past year, we’ve been working hard on our AI-based offering.

3 - Data: insights for everyone

"Data is the new oil” was an often-used quote in 2019 - and rightly so.

Data can be priceless to businesses. CIO’s are right to be concerned about data breaches, privacy and governance.

The true value of data, however, lies in the insights they provide. Marketers should not depend on data scientists, agencies or developers to acquire an understanding of their data. They want digestible data that immediately answer their underlying questions. How are my campaigns performing? Who are my best customers? Which leads have the highest potential and what are the best channels for a certain target group? Marketers want to be able to share relevant data with everyone in their organization and turn insights into actionable results.

The challenges that data pose to organizations also provide the greatest opportunities:

• Data can be centralized to increase productivity. This enables more targeted marketing campaigns and more effective communication with existing or potential customers.
• GDPR regulations force organizations to organize their data around customer profiles and deal with permissions responsibly. 'Data ownership' and 'consent management' are becoming more important. Companies that manage full data transparency for themselves and for their customers, will increase their existing advantage even further.

4 - Connected platforms: seeing the wood for the trees

There is a vast selection of tools available. The current marketing technology landscape contains over 7000 solutions. Applications that used to serve a single purpose - e.g. marketing automation, content management or specific personalization - are evolving towards more all-round solutions, taking away market share from each other in the process. CMO’s are finding it increasingly difficult to find their way through all these tools, which increases the risk of so-called 'integration spaghetti'.

Vendor dependency inevitably leads to questions.

Where is my data physically located and am I GDPR compliant? How do I link this data to a customer profile? And most of all: how do I make all this data actionable across my online and offline channels? 'Customer Data Platforms' are gaining ground, but their true advantage remains to be proven.

Connected platforms can put an end to 'integration spaghetti'.

Strategic guidance when trying to find the right tools and applications is key. Digital agencies with the right experts - who are well-versed in the different aspects of the digitale marketing sphere - are crucial. Marketers want to be in control and be able to make adjustments quickly. An integrated platform that is tailored to their business provides exactly what they need. It provides them with the right insights into their data and the platform can grow together with their business.

Digital Experience Platforms have proven their money’s worth in larger organizations, but their adoption by smaller SMEs has been slow. The significant price tag and lengthy onboarding process of proprietary DXPs are still an obstacle, but we expect further growth in the upcoming years.

Dropsolid helps you to capitalize on your digital opportunities in 2020.

The power is in your hands

Are you looking for your organization to make full use of all digital opportunities? Dropsolid gives you back control with the right tools, resources and people. Our open technology allows you to create the best digital experiences. With Dropsolid as your partner, you are able to use all of our expertise. We help you to make sense of your data, with actionable insights that generate results. Because in the end that's what it's all about: to create a lasting impact on your business.

You want your company to provide the best digital experience to your customers. That is exactly what we want to deliver for you at Dropsolid.

We focus on three key pillars:

• A close relationship with our customers. We want to guide our customers on all fronts, so they can deliver the ultimate digital experience - ranging from strategy and UX to implementation and optimization. We aim for a customer intimacy model, which requires experienced professionals and close collaboration across different teams and organizational levels.
   
• A unique offering. Dropsolid offers expertise and a full-service approach. All our experience is collected on our open DXP. Knowledge transfer takes place constantly between different teams, increasing our efficiency, speed and quality.
   
• Dropsolid Experience Cloud. Our open and innovative platform is unrivaled in the market and designed for mid-sized businesses and organizations.

Dropsolid in short:

• Data -and results driven
  Ranging from strategy to optimization, we use your organizational KPIs to deliver the best possible digital experience and to achieve results.
   
• Experienced team
  Our team of more than 40 developers and strategists can count on its long-time experience with complex platforms and integrations.
   
• Innovation at the service of businesses 
  We innovate with our very own Dropsolid Experience Cloud, which is packed with optimizations and tools for marketers and developers.
   
• Open source
  Open source remains the heart of our philosophy. This guarantees freedom and the best Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
   
• Close collaboration
  Our strategists, marketers and developers work closely together with the organizations they work for. Our product engineers can rely on their experiences to keep improving our open platform. We share a common mission and company culture.

Dropsolid, The Digital Experience Company

In the past year, Dropsolid has transformed itself to an open and transparent full-service digital partner for ambitious mid-sized businesses, organizations and governments. We provide you with insights into your digital opportunities and work together to build your digital strategy and open platforms. Data is becoming increasingly important in fine-tuning and optimizing your customer experiences. Smart use of data allows us to deliver a personalized digital experience. To achieve this, we combine marketing, technology and business experts.

We are fully committed to deliver excellent quality on all service levels.

We recently welcomed a number of senior profiles to our management team:

• Frédéric De Vries is in charge of strategy, UX and optimization in his role of strategic director.
• Wouter Degadt joined the team as commercial director and is responsible for a number of client relationships as senior advisor.
• Anneleen Demasure is on board as managing director for Dropsolid’s entire service delivery.
• Laurence De Medts, who has been a stronghold for many years as manager of our client relationships, will be supporting COO Steven Pepermans as operational director.

Conversations with our clients and partners revealed the need for full-service digital support, better tooling and digital platforms. Building these tools demands a different focus, a new approach and takes plenty of time and energy - though this never stopped us from striving to go further. We built our own platform, inspired by our long-standing close cooperation with innovative companies in Flanders. The platform was put on the market in 2019 as Dropsolid Experience Cloud. It proved successful out of the gate: our Soudal project won the FeWeb award for best B2B website of 2019.

Dropsolid’s dream is for every business, organization and government to have complete freedom and control over its platforms and data to offer a digital experience to all its stakeholders in a transparent and secure way.

That is what we aim for in 2020. The expansion of our management team allows our founders Steven and Dominique to keep building our dream: delivering open digital experiences with Dropsolid Experience Cloud.

Dropsolid Experience Cloud

Dropsolid has developed the first Open Digital Experience Cloud in Europe.

It is the first affordable solution on the continent that allows mid-sized businesses to stay in control over the data and the components of their digital platform. The opportunities for further customization and optimization are endless. This puts the power back into the hands of developers and marketers, so they can build the ultimate digital experience.

Dropsolid DXP: a technological marvel

Dropsolid designed a fully-fledged Digital Experience Platform on top of its existing DevOps platform, which already hosted 1800 Drupal environments. We offer all components for a fully open source DXP, which is unprecedented in the European market. At Amsterdam’s DrupalCon in 2019 - where Dropsolid was a Diamond Sponsor - this new product was presented to a wider public

Dropsolid Experience Cloud offers cloud hosting for the Drupal CMS and Drupal Commerce. It includes a wide range of developer tools. In addition, we also offer hosting and managed services for Mautic (open source Marketing Automation), including development tools for custom integrations. This works according to the same principle as Drupal.

The next component in the list is Smart Personalisation, which is plug-and-play compatible with Drupal. It is the result of years of research and investments by VLAIO. We host and use an Unomi engine as a Customer Data Platform. Dropsolid Experience Cloud offers an interface on top of our powerful engine to enable real-time, AI-driven personalization. Using Machine Learning algorithms, segments are detected automatically based on browsing behavior. This provides marketers with valuable insights from real-time traffic. This saves time when designing the most relevant personalized experiences. In addition, marketers can use the same interface to devise segments based on the Unomi data. These segments are readily available for personalization through all your digital channels in Drupal and Mautic.

Looking to capitalize on the digital opportunities that lie in wait in 2020?Get in touch.