Tag: #digitalstrategy

Customer Experience – Holiday Mastery Checklist

Posted on by annaktaylor
christmas-decorations

 

The top priority for your team during the holiday season is instant and effective customer support. From live chat, chat automation flows, and AI-powered chatbots to email, phone, and messenger integrations, a brand must offer real-time assistance to reduce bounce and abandonment rates.

 

Ahead of the holidays, perform a tune up and testing of your technology. Validate hosting services, optimize web speed and performance, establish advanced security measures & firewalls, revisit compliance, governance, and privacy protocols, perform load testing, confirm scheduled back ups, and monitor data in real-time.

 

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Digital Marketing Strategy Roadmap (Part 1)

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital blue light

 

For a brand to grow online sales, expand market reach, and increase website traffic, a blended technical/creative/data-driven digital strategy is a powerful means to achieve critical goals. The roadmap requires performance-based initiatives, well-planned campaigns, iterative testing, and an agile methodology.

Important First Stage

  • Define primary success factors
  • Craft a precise and unique value proposition
  • Identify key performance indicators
  • Pinpoint target markets

Establishing the business objective gives you a ‘North Star’ before strategy deployment. For each initiative, be thoughtful and explicit in forming the measurable results that you want the team to reach.

Sidebar – be ambitious with your objectives! Now is not the time to be conventional or cautious. 

A Sample of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

  • Capture more of the market share [how to outperform the competition]
  • Increase organic traffic to the website and social channels [how to better attract the audience]
  • Enhance customer engagement [how to create resonating experiences]
  • Reduce bounce rate [how to demonstrate value and relevancy to compel interest]
  • Improve conversion rate [how to enhance the customer journey to trigger action]
  • Raise incremental sales [how to effectively position products to motivate a purchase]
  • Consistency with monthly revenue rate [how to decrease churn and maintain a steady flow of new visitors]

When creating strategies – aim for impact and efficiency.  Be willing to forego strategies that cannot offer these requisites. 

Digital Marketing Initiatives

  • Content marketing
  • Digital channels
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Paid advertising
  • Social media
  • Influencer marketing
  • Affiliate programs
  • Video marketing
  • Rich media
  • Events and community engagement
  • Email marketing

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The Pathway of Digital Performance

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital growth and performance chart

 

Consumers make decisions based upon their own evaluation path, which is influenced by timing, imperativeness, sentiments, and risk & reward triggers, along with factors of price, quality, and value. Empower your audience to organically assess your offerings with their own trusted sense of significance – this helps to prevent feelings of misgiving, skepticism, or pressure.

A business must demonstrate their intention to get it right through relevant and enriching experiences. Across channels, the brand should engage, share, interact, and applaud. Provide insight, information, and inspiration that compels curiosity and interest.

Best Practices

  • Create a cross-channel strategy
  • Curate consistent messaging across touch points
  • Motivate engagement, interaction, and conversion
  • Messaging for 6 I’s: influence, intrigue, insight, inspiration, interest, and information
  • Persuade, don’t sell or pitch
  • Repurpose evergreen content
  • Utilize rich media and visual assets to heighten engagement
  • Make it easy to interact with the brand
  • Automate workflows and trigger campaigns across platforms
  • Be tactical on cadence, timing, and experiences
  • Optimize for relevancy and value
  • Use audience segmentation and customer journey mapping to maximize conversions

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Mastering & Leveraging Business Intelligence

Posted on by annaktaylor
big data with colorful graphic

 

While a broad term, Business Intelligence (BI) has a wide scope of significance involving data, processes, performance, and measurements. BI is the means and infrastructure used to aggregate, maintain, and analyze data to develop business strategies and operational efficiencies.

Leaders utilize BI to improve decision-making and target activities.

BI answers monetization questions, such as:

  • What happened?
  • Where and when did it happen?
  • How often?
  • What is the trend?
  • What should we do based on what happened?
  • What potential optimization can be made?
  • What action can we take to boost performance?

There are a range of data tools that fall under BI including mining, analytics, visualization, benchmarking, reporting, warehousing, and technology-driven planning and processes.

In all instances, data must be prepared before being applied to a tool effectively. 

Data Readiness

  • Extracting and Provisioning
  • Compiling and Cleansing
  • Standardizing and Formatting
  • Parsing and Structuring
  • Eliminating Errors or Anomalies
  • Grouping and Clustering
  • Storing and Securing

 

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Mastering the Deluge of Data

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital strategy and innovation

 

Attentive, attuned, and analytically inspired digital leaders closely monitor sales and cost metrics, qualitative and quantitative stats, and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). More broadly referred to as ‘data’.

There are known challenges with data collection, preparation, and validation including:

  • Data overload
  • Data stability
  • Assemble and prioritization data
  • Preventing omission of key data points
  • Organization of data to make it usable
  • Taking advantage of data visualization for optimal consumption
  • Gaining insights that can be tested
  • Craft a roadmap for maximum output based on data
  • Pivoting within a plan or shifting an objective due to data outcomes

Prevailing strategies are architected using business intelligence – this is owned data, sourced from customers, sales, performance, operations, marketing, social media, and industry trends.

Types of Data

Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured

Transactional

Hierarchical and Ordered

Text and Meta

Qualitative and Quantitative

The “V” elements of data are variety, volume, value, velocity, veracity, and variability.   When handling data, pay attention to each of these characteristics.

[Step 1]  Utilize a Powerful Digital Dashboard

Creating an impactful plan of action starts with data visualization from charts, pies, tables, and other graphic representations of data.

When selecting a dashboard tool, here is a checklist of key features:

  • User-friendly, high performing interface
  • Intuitive navigation menu and filters
  • Contemporary cards, charts, and forms
  • Wide variety of pre-set templates
  • Multiple layout options
  • Fast-loading import / export feature (multi-file upload is a bonus)
  • Customized views for different types of users
  • Easy widgets to add new tables and elements to a page
  • Tooltips, bookmarks, notifications, and alerts
  • Calendar, email, and to-do list features
  • Data authentication and identification of errors
  • Editing tools
  • Suite of reports with automation capability
  • Color, font, and background controls
  • Interactive with popular platforms and plugins
  • Cross-browser compatible
  • Mobile friendly and fully responsive

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Strategy Insights for 7 Digital Business Models

Posted on by annaktaylor
Interface technology, the future of user experience.

 

B2C, B2B, D2C, Omnichannel, Social Commerce, Marketplaces – each has distinctive selling strategies and opportunities.  Consider which one (or few) aligns with your business model and objectives.

 

B2C

Often, this is a business with several brands or categories with broad demographics for its prospective customers, aiming for sales volume even if profit margins are tight.

Ecommerce Strategy: A heavy emphasis on promotions, incentive selling, and strong market positioning. Creative campaigns that are compelling and impactful are essential to establish a unique selling proposition and a competitive advantage. The drive is to influence motivation and trigger actions. Discounts, on-site sale events, clearance, exclusive coupons, and flash price drops are used to impel transactions. Generating leads is orchestrated with contextual insight, optimized messaging, personalized experiences, and a cadence of interactions that acquire, enable, and engage.

 

B2B

A business selling products and/or services to other commercial businesses – either in a single sector or several different verticals.

Ecommerce Strategy: There is an emphasis on industry authority, building relationships, and tactical selling based on price points, bulk purchases, recurring orders, or a contractual buying schedule. Content marketing and a highly effective communication style are key to B2B digital sales because it’s here where information is king. The business is a partner to the customer with solution-based services and an optimal product mix.  The company must be prominent in its online placement, reviews, directories, and citations. And build an empire of insights, because the customer is continually seeking knowledge and ideas to strengthen their operation and performance.

 

D2C

Businesses that are innovative, expedient, and principled in their selling of one or multiple product lines where need, interest, and enthusiasm are high motivators for an audience that has been segmented into specific buyer personas.

Ecommerce Strategy: Maintain a focus on agility, iterative experiments, and optimal user experiences throughout the buying journey. Whether solving a problem or sparking an interest, use of rich media and social channels are critical to achieving order placement, repeat business, loyalty, and development of ambassadors. As a business designs its strategy, the pillars must start with mobile and site performance – both of these tower above other reigning factors.

 

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