Your organization’s digital experience is the combination of all interactions your audience has with your brand in the online realm. This includes your website, social media, digital advertising, email marketing, mobile applications, and all other online touchpoints.
A high performing digital experience is ultimately measured by the results it can drive which might be leads, sales, engagements or some other metric that supports your marketing and business goals.
But a high performing digital experience cannot only deliver business results – your audience must see and experience value as they interact with your brand. A satisfying experience is the place where user needs and business value intersect. Therefore, delivering value to your audience is as critical as delivering your marketing information in order to build a high performing experience.
How do we build an experience that delivers value to your audience and value to your business?
Evaluate
The first step (and often the step that is overlooked by marketers) is understanding your audience’s needs. Sources of audience information can include:
- Search data (from tools like SEMRush, Search Console, AHRefs, or Keyword Planner). This information can give you insights into the questions related to your business that your audience is typically typing into Google.
- Social Media data can help you understand what online conversations are happening related to your business and industry.
- Message boards, forums and Reddit are another place to look at online conversations.
- Customer research provides a customized window into your audience. Although more resource-intensive, surveys, customer interviews or focus groups allow you to gain a very unique perspective into your audience.
- Front-line staff interact with current and prospective customers every day. Talking to these people can help you understand what questions and feedback your audience has when interacting with your business.
Now that your audience information is captured, you need to synthesize that information. What trends or categories can you observe in that information? Look to align the categories and groupings of user needs along the buyer’s journey. This helps you align the types of information your audience is looking for to where they might be at in their research journey. Our aim is to build an improved digital experience that supports and satisfies your audience’s needs along the customer journey.
Audit
That foundational understanding of your audience and their needs along the customer journey gives you the information needed to audit your current digital touchpoints. Review all of the ways in which you interact with your audience online. Thes touchpoints ought to include:
- Websites, landing pages and microsites
- Social media pages and content
- Email marketing, newsletters, and drip campaigns
- All digital, programmatic, social, and search advertisements
- Mobile applications
In reviewing your digital touchpoints, the most important skill for a marketer is empathy. We need to step into the minds of our audience, understand their needs and their point of view, and determine if the digital ecosystem is satisfying their needs.
The two most important questions we need to answer with our audit is (a) What stages of the journey are we supporting with this digital touchpoint? And (b) What user needs are we satisfying?
This audit will identify areas where we are delivering value, and most importantly, the gaps we are failing to address with our audience.
Improve
The audit will provide some clear guidance about what major gaps need to be addressed. However, it is critical to understand that not every organization will deliver the same digital experience for the same audience.
Your business, your brand and your strategy all play an important role in building a high performing digital experience. It is critical that you understand the unique way in which your organization delivers value to your audience, and ensure that is clearly reflected as you satisfy your user’s needs.
It is important that we don’t merely satisfy user needs, but instead that we satisfy user needs in a way that is unique and authentic to your organization. This will not only deliver value to your audience, but ensure that your competitors cannot touch you.