With recent events around the world, the digital industry has been booming with all companies now understanding the importance of going digital.
The biggest mistake a company could make would be rushing to go digital without understanding their clients and providing a good overall digital experience.
Here are 5 things you should do to provide a great digital experience for your clients:
1.Understanding your customers
This is the most import part of any marketing or digital campaign, in order to sell your services or products and receive a good ROI, you need to first find out the answers to the below questions:
- Who are your customers? Segment your customers by grouping them by age, location, sex, interest, job titles etc.
- Do they need your product? Once you have narrowed down who your customers are, ask yourself if the product or service you are offering solves a problem that they are having.
- Why you? With so many companies out there offering the same services and products, why should these potential customers buy from you?
- What devices are they using? Knowing what devices your target audience is using is crucial if 90% of your audience the browser and complete purchases online using a mobile device, all your ads and your website should be created for mobile-first usage.
- What language do they speak, serving ad content in your target audience’s native language will increase your ROI.
2.Align your brand to suit your target audience
A company’s brand identity reflects who they are and the product or service they are selling. Being able to associate your company and brand with the product or service you offer will serve as a constant reminder to your clients when they see or hear of anything that could resemble your services. For example, if you sell coffee, you want your clients to think of you the next time they have a craving for coffee. Having a great brand identity should not be something any company compromises on.
3.Create a good online user experience
Know who your customers are? Great, have your brand aligned with your product? Great, now its time you create an amazing online experience for your clients. Knowing who your customers are and having a great brand identity and awareness is all good but if your online user experience doesn’t allow your audience to easily purchase your product or service, find your business or even fill in an inquiry form, you are going to lose out. Answer these questions when creating a good user experience:
- Is my site easy to navigate?
- Are my website and landing pages mobile friendly?
- Do all my links and website functionality work?
- Can customers find my contact details easily?
- Is my website speed fast enough? If not how can I optimize better for speed?
- If I were to purchase a product on my website what obstacles will I face? and how can I eliminate these obstacles to provide a better experience?
- What would cause someone to not fill in an inquiry form or complete a purchase on my website?
Knowing the answers to the above questions is crucial to the user experience, knowing what problems your target audience faces when trying to check out or submit an inquiry or generally navigating through your website could help increase your leads and sales and have them coming back. A fast, easy to use and straight to the point website is what you want to aim for. Be transparent in everything you put online, having hidden costs and other agendas could serve a bad user experience and will cost you the sale.
4.Personalize your campaigns
In the digital world, most if not everything is automated with very little human interaction. As studies have shown, one of the basic human needs is interaction with another. This stands true in the digital world as well as a campaign that has a personal and humanized touch often do perform better than those that don’t. Facebook has also adopted this approach by serving humanized and content-based posts more than product or service-based posts. A simple approach such as including your client’s name in a newsletter you send out can increase engagement and open rates. Personalize your campaigns to provide a human touch and make your clients feel as important as they actually are.
5.Review the results & understand the data
Once you have completed the above four steps and have run your digital campaign, make sure to check in a review of the data and results on a monthly basis. Users’ interests change over time as well as their demographics such as their location and job titles etc. Knowing which demographics work best for your company and the service/product you are providing can allow you to eliminate the ones that aren’t and save you money on your campaign thus increasing your ROI.
Understanding data can also help you find users that did not commit but showed interest in your product or service, you can then run a re-marketing campaign and offer these users an incentive such as a discount if they come through and complete their purchase or inquiry. Remember to subscribe to my LinkedIn Newsletter.
