Sometimes it’s hard to stay focused on what’s important for front-end digital teams in a company, particularly when there are so many things which could be done.
Now an exco view or a smart consulting company is going to give a list like this:
- Define your business strategy
- Look at your business process and operating model
- Define your digital strategy, process and operating model in the light of one and two
- Choose digital products to create change within the organization
- Look at your architecture and technology you want to use
- Understand how data and analytics will play their part
- Do a business case and ROI analysis
- Execute the above
Here’s the problem – that’s a three-to-ten-year journey. And how many members on an executive or board change in ten years — a large percentage of them. Therefore, trying to maintain consistency of rollout of a multiyear plan is hard when people and priorities keep shifting.
But most digital teams don’t start from here. They have new strategy coming in on the one side, and a host of competing priorities on the other:
- Large backlogs of historical things they just need to get done
- Stakeholders hoping for new and shiny things to be delivered
- Demanding KPIs
- Vendor management and or management of internal teams
- Etc.
It becomes a juggle between trying to align with what the board and executive team are thinking and digital things which need to get taken care of to make the digital ecosystem work.
So how does one tackle the problem?
- Start with getting the funnel working
At the top of the digital funnel, reach is required to as many people as possible and at the bottom, conversion is required to impact the bottom line or key goals of the organisation.
Marketing, social and content teams need to ensure the right content and campaigns are reaching the broadest base of people possible to draw as many people into the top of the digital funnel as possible.
From there, UX and product teams need to ensure the journeys and offerings are as efficient as possible to bring people down the funnel and conversion rate optimisation teams need to figure out how to make conversion rates as high as possible.
This is the heartbeat if any digital team. And yet, digital teams often get so lost in the things talked about above that they forget to ask the simple question: does our digital funnel work?
2. Data is critical
Having the ability to capture the right data and utilise it is the other side of the coin. An organisation’s funnel can work very well, but if the data is not being captured and analysed, it’s like having a cullender and not a funnel.
From a data perspective, if you’ve got good traffic, start with segmenting the audience with a DMP and targeting those users on the Internet as well as using look alike audiences.
From there, it’s about moving audiences from anonymous to know through login scenarios, lead generation etc. to identify the base as well as looking for information gaps and strategies to fill those gaps.
Practically, companies often have massive gaps in terms of percentages of accurate email addresses, mobile numbers, location of their users and personal information.
This must be one of the starting focal points for improving data sets and capitalising on them.
3. Personalisation
Once the funnel is working correctly and the quality and volume of data is on the increase, then personalising content to the user base becomes important.
What are the interaction patterns of the base, what are their preferences or interests and how do users get interacted with based on that information?
When do you communicate with someone on their journey? Do you have opt-ins to marketing material? Are you communicating to someone based on their preferences or their purchase or interaction history?
While companies should be targeting users based on their preference, so often they are targeted on the basis of age, location, gender, the device used. But actually, these metrics do little to bring clarity to the type of user the organisation is trying to reach.
4. Focused projects
Once 1-3 are working well, then what can be done on an incremental basis or product evolution basis to grow metrics?
Using digital for customer satisfaction, gamification, self-service, cost reduction, improving efficiencies and so on are all projects which can be explored.
MVP’s can be created, and pilots can be run to test the projects’ efficiencies. From there, key projects can be identified and budgeted for to move forward.
5. Shifting the needle
If all the above is in play, then organisations can think about what would shift the needle on a digital front in a larger way.
Does the company need a new channel like a messaging bot? Could a ticketing system improve client interactions? Could staff be more empowered with digital hardware and software like tablets and software for direct interactions with clients?
In other words, what big projects could be undertaken to make a significant impact for the business.
The challenge:
The challenge is digital teams are often expected to start with 5 and 4 and try and juggle 1-3. On a scale of 1-10, CDOs ideally need points 1-3 to be working at a 7/10 or higher before they think of 4 and 5. Once that’s happening, then the focused projects in number 4 will give medium term wins, while large scale projects in 5 will give long term wins.
Sometimes this order of priority may not be possible but knowing what you need to be doing and then figuring out how to try and get the support to do it is the first important step.