Inside Google Marketing: Digital transformation with Bethany Poole

Bethany Poole: When it comes to digital transformation, you don’t have to do everything, but you have to do something. We’ve all been through this period of enormous change. And some things will stay changed and some things will go back to the way they were before. Our job is to know the difference and help our customers navigate that.

I am Bethany Poole. I’m the senior director of One Google Ads Marketing. My job is to bring the best of Google Ads together to help marketers solve their toughest problems and help push the industry forward. “Digital transformation” is a term you hear a lot these days, and many people think of it as a complicated process that they need to do; it’s going to take years to figure out; and there’s no finish line in sight. But we actually think of it really differently: as an essential, ongoing process that can help you drive short-term business growth and long-term business resilience.

I love that we get to bring diverse teams together to solve really tough problems. So I love that I work with creatives. I work with writers, storytellers, data analysts, and insights. We figure out what consumer behaviors and insights are most relevant to marketers, and help inspire and educate them so that they can grow their businesses and connect with customers.

We partnered with the Boston Consulting Group to survey 2,000 companies around the world to figure out what they were doing and what digital enablement looked like. And the thing that was amazing is, across all of the different companies, they had one thing in common: The ones that were leading were really big fans of experimentation. They were trying new things, finding out what worked, and then scaling it — and finding out what didn’t work, and turning it down. And that allowed them to be much more agile, much more nimble, and much more successful.

In talking to our customers, we realized that they had actually made great strides in transforming pieces of their business. But marketing was really struggling, because the CMO couldn’t do it alone. And so as much progress as they made, they’d only get so far without the help of the rest of the C-suite.

And so we realized we needed to find a way to help them talk to the rest of their business and talk to the rest of the organization, so everyone was pointed in the same direction.

With Route to Ready, we’ve broken down transformation into six more manageable pieces that can be customized based on what your business need is. These six pieces help businesses find the right starting point and build a plan.

It builds a structure and foundation for your business to find results today, and then build long-term resilience for tomorrow. Marketers can decide where the easiest and most impactful place is to start for their business.

Digital transformation matters to marketers, because it creates new opportunities. And from those opportunities, they can find new areas for growth. It also gives them more control. You can test new ideas and see what works, and then bring it back and scale it.

The critical thing is to make a case for digital transformation, get senior stakeholders aligned and bought in, and then commit to the ongoing process, so you’re ready for whatever comes next.