Digital transformation in marketing is often described as a technology project: new systems, new data, new channels. In my experience, it is decided somewhere else. It succeeds where people with very different ways of thinking learn to work towards a shared goal. This becomes especially clear when a strategy consultancy and a creative team sit at the same table.
I have been in that situation myself. I led digital marketing, content and editorial strategy with a team of ten people and played a central role in a company’s digital transformation, working alongside a large strategy consultancy. What I learned there is less about methods than about attitude.
- Digital transformation in marketing is first a question of collaboration and only then a question of technology.
- Strategy provides direction and measurability, creative work provides meaning and recognition.
- Both sides need a shared language and clear decision rights.
- A roadmap only holds if the team can carry it forward in its daily work.
Table of contents
What digital transformation in marketing really means
At its core, the way a marketing team makes decisions changes. Campaigns used to be planned, produced and evaluated afterwards. Today planning, delivery and measurement happen almost at the same time. Taking that seriously means reorganising workflows, roles and responsibilities, not just swapping tools.
Drawing on many examples, McKinsey describes how companies usually bring the will to change, while scaling it remains the real hurdle (see here: McKinsey, Rewired in Action). That matches what I have seen: the plan is rarely the problem. It gets difficult when the plan has to arrive in a team’s daily work.
That is why I put little stock in measuring a transformation by the number of new tools. A more telling question is whether decisions are made faster and on better grounds than before. If a team has the same discussions after a year as it did before, only with new dashboards, little has changed. If, on the other hand, it knows which questions it can answer itself and which it cannot, a lot has been achieved.
Two ways of thinking at one table
A strategy consultancy thinks in hypotheses, target pictures and metrics. It asks which lever has the biggest effect and how to measure it. A creative team thinks in ideas, images and stories. It asks what makes a brand unmistakable and how it feels. Both questions are right, and neither is enough on its own.
Tension arises when one side sees the other as an obstacle. Then metrics feel like control to creatives, and ideas feel like gut instinct to consultants. I saw my job as translating: why an idea is also a business argument, and why a metric can create room for a good idea.
A shared language as the precondition
A shared language does not come from workshops alone, but from a few shared terms. What does success mean for a campaign? Which metric counts as a signal and which only as a hint? Who decides when data and instinct point in different directions? Once these questions are settled early, many conflicts lose their edge.
Clear decision rights matter just as much. Who answers which question belongs in the structure, not in the mood of the day. I have written about this in more detail in the article on marketing organisation. Without that clarity, digital transformation in marketing turns into a sequence of alignment meetings.
Why digital transformation in marketing is decided in daily work
A roadmap is a promise. It is kept in briefings, approvals and editorial plans. That is why I made sure every major change found a place in the team’s weekly rhythm. Whatever does not find a place there remains a slide.
This also means understanding content as a flow rather than as individual pieces. Anyone who plans, produces and reuses content needs reliable workflows. I describe how to calculate them honestly in the article on the content supply chain. Only once these foundations are in place do new tools have an effect.
It also helped me to make small results visible. A better editorial plan, a clearer approval, a metric everyone understands: steps like these look modest, but they build trust. And trust is the currency in which a larger change is paid for.
What I would do differently
I would hand responsibility to the team earlier. External support brings pace and structure, but at some point a project ends. Digital transformation in marketing then has to be carried by the people who work with it every day. The earlier they make decisions themselves, the more stable the result.
What remains open for me is how much of this shifts again with AI. Many of the workflows we reorganised back then are changing once more today. How I think about that is set out in the article on AI strategy for the marketing department. The basic rule stays the same for me: settle the collaboration first, then the technology.