You Can Build Your Digital Foundation in Stages — But You Must Build It!

If you accept the fact that today’s digitally sophisticated customer demands personalized, in-context, real-time experiences to be interested in your brand, then certain consequences are inevitable.

You Need Data to Create Unforgettable Experiences.
First, you can’t really create dynamite personal, dynamic, interactive experiences without having access to the volumes of analytic data that are available today regarding your customers’ online behaviors. Next, you must learn what your customers’ journeys are with your brand at all touchpoints and on all channels. Then, you have to create the experiences and use the results of customers’ feedback, changing your campaign quickly to respond to what you learn.

You can’t really do that with fragmented systems and siloed departments, each working for its own operational efficiency without regard for the customer experience.

You need a digital foundation.

Build Your Digital Foundation in Manageable Stages.
Unless you have a huge enterprise with significant resources, you won’t likely go out tomorrow and just buy a digital foundation! It has to evolve — something you can support in manageable steps.

1. Literally, Map Out Your Customer’s Journey With Your Brand.
Get everyone together — from marketing to production to shipping and receiving — in a room around a table with a BIG piece of paper on it and map every touchpoint and every channel and every possible interaction. Sure, you could do this digitally, but good ol’ colored pens and paper work great, allowing everyone to participate and brainstorm together. Show every department how its actions impact customers’ perceptions of your brand. This helps everyone to start working for their true bosses — the customers.

2. Identify Everything — Online and Off — That Makes Up Your Operation.
That includes all the cloud-based services you use, all the local servers, and all the things like your point-of-sale system, email-marketing system, and call centers. Identify places where the customer journey becomes interrupted or sidetracked. Do you see lots of fragments and places where processes could be combined and integrated? This is where the creation of your digital foundation begins.

3. Clearly Articulate Your Brand’s Business Imperatives and Priorities.
Make sure everyone is on the same page and clear about what your business wants. Do you want more customers, better product lines, expansion into more markets? Everyone should understand — and be working toward — the same goals.

4. Totally Clean Up Internal Bottlenecks and Silo Breakdowns.
Maybe you want to start by integrating your production system with your sales and marketing processes. There will be computer issues to face and changes in workflows to consider. Your salespeople should be perfectly synchronized with what marketing is doing and how production is able to respond. Never again should salespeople have to call customers to explain that certain promotions aren’t available like they thought they were or that their orders will be delayed because production fell behind.

5. Create Opportunities to Delight Customers Using Your Customer-Journey Map.
Find a manageable starting point considering your available resources. Maybe you decide that you can create personalized email offers based on analytic data you have or will have. Fully explore your options — including creating email messages that are aware of the customer’s location at the time of opening — and provide offers relevant to that moment.

Or, maybe you decide you should create dynamic and interactive content on your homepage. It’s alright to create the work in stages, do lots of A/B testing, and revise your content often.

6. Make Digital Excellence Your New Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
You need a new mindset and new elements to measure if you are to successfully make the creation of outstanding content a priority throughout your organization. Most businesses focus on sales revenue and view content as they would a product brochure. But today, the content comes first for a customer who may never talk to you. If you are to truly succeed in today’s digital world, you may need to focus on successful engagement, with revenue as a likely byproduct of providing great content.

Measuring engagement is not as elusive as you might think. In fact, it is quite tangible and can be measured through analytics such as website dwell-time, pages per visit, social shares, comments and likes (including making individual content assets a “favorite”), product reviews, video views, and more.

If you get the dynamic content right, then revenue won’t be far behind. But, get it wrong, and your customer will be long gone.

Building your digital foundation in manageable, incremental steps makes sense and can take you where you want to be — within budget and on schedule. Defining manageable steps and stages is much better than staying with old systems and processes that don’t match the expectations of today’s customers.

The post You Can Build Your Digital Foundation in Stages — But You Must Build It! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/can-build-digital-foundation-stages-must-build/