Digital, Social & Mobile in 2016

From my previous post about Social I started looking around to see what Social growth metrics I could find.  I found a great report that breaks it down globally.  Mobile devices are and will remain on the rise.   This is a major factor that will play into your Digital Experience.   Instead of building sites for desktop display, you will need to start with mobile and then build up to larger displays.

We are Social

Social

I wanted to jot this down real quick when I heard it.  I have struggled with adapting Social Media to our business, but this helped me break it down.

"If you get to the heart of social, you realize why it is so popular.  It is personal, every single social experience is happening just for you in real-time.  This is a lesson for us as we build our Digital Experience." 

5 Keys to the digital Experience

I just finished reading the "5 Keys to the Digital Experience Equation" from Oracle.   In this white paper the authors provide an exploration of the five key components of the digital experience equation.  They list these 5 key components as:

1. Content and Commerce
2. Customers and Context
3. Digital and physical convergence
4. Brand and commerce convergence
5. Scalability

1. Content and Commerce

• Content assets take many different forms and can stem from dozens of systems within an organization as well as external sources.

I hadn't thought about the content and how Commerce and brand sites are the two types of content used in Commerce.  the papers states that most product information resides on the ecommerce site and brand content is featured on the brand site.  The example below show the segregation between the two.

By bringing all of this content together and not having the visitor 
visit multiple destinations companies can differentiate themselves by providing and engaging digital shopping journey that brings together commerce and content at all stages.

In order to provide a successful digital experience you need to ensure that your content is available and that you are able to dynamically filter and adapt this content in real time.  In addition access to data originating from other sources like, CRM, Search and navigation, ERP, Social Media, in-store data, merchandising, pricing, inventory, customer service and more.

2. Customers and Context

• Content in context of the customer at any point of the purchase journey

This is all about providing the right content in the right context to the individual customer.  In addition to knowing what context to provide, you must have context on the customer.    Knowing who they are, their age and demographics, where they have been and even anticipating what they will do next.  To truly provide a personalized and engaging experience you have to leverage data to present relevant content, at any point in the customer journey both pre and post sells.

3. Digital and Physical Convergence

• Synchronization of online and offline customer behavior as the lines between these channels further blur

Digital experience cannot be restricted to online channels.  You will need to be able to capture both online and offline channels to be able to understand the customer context at any given time.  In physical environments some companies are leveraging digital displays that provide relevant content.  This could be videos, interactive kiosks, previous purchase history.  Some companies have developed clienteling applications that allow sales associates to provide optimized sales assistance.

4. Brand and Commerce Convergence

• Collaboration between marketing and commerce team with shared systems and metrics

In order to achieve the ability to provide a quality digital experience the silo's between marketing and commerce teams need to be broken down.  Both should be a combined to create a highly collaborative team.  They should be empowered to collaborate, sit together and have similar and combined success metrics.  By keeping these two separated you find yourself supporting multiple technology platforms for delivery, this is redundant and expensive.

5. Scalability

• Ability to scale for new brands, touch-points, markets, or even single-purpose campaigns

To deliver a relevant experience that is tailored to the individual customer you have to be able to scale in providing relevant content.  It is impossible to do this with static pages, there is no way to create static pages for every potential customer journey or path.  Beyond the online experience, companies also need to consider scaling to new digital formats, new sites and new business models.

References: 5 Keys to the Digital Experience Equation, John DeCapria and Laura Swanson, FitForCommerce

Education

I have started this blog in an attempt to help me educate myself on the subject of Digital Experience.  The is a new trend that is coming and is going to change the way that companies use the internet, marketing, e-commerce, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Point of Sale (POS) and more to sell there products and services to us.

So I figured the best way to do this, was to start a blog where I can write about this space, trends, process, technologies and more.   I need to have a deep understanding for my job and secondly I see this being the next wave that if you understand how all the pieces work together and can help companies increase revenues and profits you can make a lot of money.  Sorry don't mean to sound greedy but money keeps the lights on.