Why Every Business Needs a Unified Digital Business Platform

It is wholly inevitable that more and more of your business will be ongoingly transacted via mobile devices. With Pew Research reporting that people glance at their smartphone 100 times or more each day, it’s in your best interests that some of those glances are connecting with your own business. Mobile ecommerce is taking an ever bigger share of the retail sector, as highlighted by IMRG’s monthly e-Retail Sales Index. Most of the financial services industry, including banking and insurance is almost entirely online. In fact you would struggle to find a sector which has not been impacted by the shift first to online, and latterly to mobile devices.

The possibilities for what manner of business you can run and transact digitally are almost limitless, most companies have several different revenue streams which can lead to a degree of inherent complexity in operations. A typical mid-sized business runs its key sales and marketing activities via a centralised CRM or ERM system. Often based around SalesForce, this is then integrated into mailing clients like MailChimp, a separate CMS / blogging system, separate ecommerce system, alongside a myriad of communications, ad management systems, social media, analytics etc.

Scope of Digital Business Delivery

The following are some of they key activities you might wish to deliver digitally:

• Advertising / Campaigns / Promotions
• Collaboration
• Community
• Content & Media Feeds
• Ecommerce & Digital Retail - Selling both digital and solid goods
• Education / Elearning / Training
• Events & Awards
• Feature Articles / Blogs / Insights / Reports
• Funding & Fundraising
• Industry Analysis / Intelligence / Trends
• Industry & Performance Benchmarking
• Partner & Supplier Directories
• Marketplace
• Monetised Services
• Networking
• On-demand Content & Media
• Paid-Downloads
• Pay-wall Content & Services (FT style / Metered Content)
• Personalisation / Personalised Content / News Alerts & Digests
• Personalised Communications / Messaging / Forums & Bulletin Boards
• Prospecting & Lead Management
• Recruitment
• Research
• Search
• Seminars & Webinars
• Social Media / Sharing / Promotion
• Subscriptions

Typical 3rd party system Integrations

To succeed digitally you also usually need a number of additional ancillary services:

• Advertising / Campaign Servers
• Analytics / Stats / Beacons / Testing / Trackers
• CDN (Content Delivery Networks)
• CRM
• Email Marketing Services
• ERM
• Lead Management
• Media Players
• Search
• SEO / Taxonomy / Topics
• Social Tools

Scale of 3rd Party CMS Integrations

The most commonly integrated technologies / systems with CMS platforms (via Econsultancy - % of companies polled 2014):

1. Analytics (72%)
2. Personalization (53%)
3. CRM (51%)
4. Digital Asset Management (49%)
5. Ecommerce Platform (47%)
6. Multichannel Campaign Management (45%)
7. A/B Multivariate Testing (41%)
8. On-site Social Tools (Comments, Ratings, Reviews, Forums etc.) (35%)
9. Off-site Social Media Tools (Facebook, Twitter etc.) (29%)

The vast majority of digital businesses out there are composed of labyrinthine composites of numerous different systems and platforms. Some composed of as many as 30 or more different systems, which does not just make for excessive overhead costs, but ties down most of your technical resources to simply maintaining delivery and quality of service.

A Unified Digital Business Platform like Affino - covers the vast majority of activities you might want to engage in (pretty much all of the activities listed in Scope above) - all in a singularly powerful and seamless system. The upshot of which is that you spend less time simply maintaining your infrastructure, and more time on evolving and developing your offerings and services.

The Benefits of a Unified Digital Platform

In deploying a singularly powerful and seamless system, there are numerous benefits to be found, including the following:

ADAPTABILITY - Ease of / flexibility in and speed of change, being able to react quickly to the whims of your sector / marketplace and take proper advantage of time-sensitive opportunities

AUTOMATION - Running such a variety of seamlessly connected services gives you unprecedented Sales, Marketing, Process and Services Automation. Affino has a unique Automated Customer Ladder which allows you to target and automatically respond to every customer contact and activity

CONTROL - You are only properly in Control when you have total jurisdiction over your systems - this can never happen if your setup is overly reliant on a mishmash of 3rd party integrations. Affino’s all-in-one approach gives you unprecedented Control over all your activities

EFFICIENCY - Having everything in one system means you don’t have to dedicate resources to maintaining 3rd party integrations. You get a much more streamlined and vastly more efficient operation with lower running costs.

EMPOWERMENT - With everything under your jurisdiction you can get the most out of your existing resources. Your own staff members can be hands-on with all your activities, and you can do more for less, and with less

OVERSIGHT - The key concept of Single Customer View can only really happen with a unified singular system - where a single, universal interface connects you to all your customers’ activities, and connects all your customers to you in the same universal fashion

PRODUCTIVITY - The essential combination of OVERSIGHT, EMPOWERMENT and EFFICIENCY. A single person can deliver the output of a whole department, a small team can take on corporations

PROFITABILITY - No other single system has as many revenue streams as Affino, with its 20+ commercial engines and 50 conversion event triggers. When you account for the significantly lower costs of ownership - reduced overheads, maintenance etc, it all leads to a very strong bottom line

SCALE - The breadth and width of what you can accomplish is unequalled. Affino is also hosted on the Amazon Cloud, utilising the Scalr technology, which means rapid scaling up of service offerings, and coping with traffic in excess of 100,000,000 users

SCOPE - This is the depth and granularity with which you can target customers - multi-domain, internationalisation, glocalisation and localisation

Deploying a Unified Digital Business Platform also protects you from Cookie Armageddon - i.e. the ability of privacy tools to switch off cookie-powered services. Most digital businesses are vulnerable to Cookie Armageddon as they are largely reliant on 3rd party cookie-activated services in delivering the bulk of their interactive functionalities. A unified platform serves everything in-house so-to-speak which leaves you less exposed to the foibles of 3rd party integrations.