IT Focus Area: digital

If you are a professional charged with fostering effective, data-driven digital marketing opportunities for your customers, you know how critical it is to create an agile digital experience that not only puts you ahead of your customers’ shifting requirements but also provides a meaningful digital experience that keeps your customers coming back for more.

As companies continue to pursue digital transformation, move workloads to the cloud and adapt to change, they need a way to securely deliver effective customer engagement across every digital touchpoint. When you can do this with flexibility, speed and security—regardless of whether your platform is on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid, or across multiple public clouds—you know you are getting it right. However, in order to get there, you will need to first look at your challenges before you can design on your ideal approach.

Common roadblocks that can prevent you from realizing your best digital experience

When your organization requires constant change, businesses can fall into a cycle of overhauling their digital marketing technology stack once it becomes outdated, and restyling their website along with it. But this can create a jarring experience for customers who have to re-learn your interface and how to interact with your brand. Other challenges include:

• Stagnant user experience, often because it is tied to the legacy technology platform
• Stale content even if it is migrated to a new platform
• Site and page structure that is tied to an inflexible technology
• Minimal details into your analytics, leaving you uninformed about critical customer activity on your site
• Your IT team is too busy with other demands to actively maintain your technology platform or to make updates quickly to support the needs of your marketing team
• Marketing gets stuck in a non-functioning, outdated platform, and struggles to innovate or take advantage of any new features

All of this leads to a frustrated marketing team that is doing their best with the limited tools and support they have. If you are not careful, it can also lead to expensive digital overhauls that cause customer churn as they struggle to familiarize themselves with your new digital presence.

6 tips to foster a successful digital marketing experience

The following tips will help you achieve greatness in your digital experience—and will help you get there faster and easier.

1. Examine your pains

You will always want to start by taking a deep dive into your pain points, as well as looking at your primary goals and objectives. Are you giving your customers enough of a personalized experience? Can your authors publish content as quickly and often as they need to? Is the visibility into your customers’ behavior too limited? Are you missing out on conversions or cross-selling opportunities? Knowing the root of these issues will help inform you about the types of solutions you need to optimize your digital performance.

2. Look closely at your industry

Consider solutions your competitors may be leveraging to achieve the kind of results you want. With many organizations going toward SaaS and cloud-based models, some marketers might get left behind. For example, if you only have a cloud-based offering, you may opt to keep your data in your own data center. Look at all your options before diving head-first into a solution that may or may not help you in the long run.

3. Build your digital capabilities on a single digital experience platform

You may want to consider consolidating to one trusted partner like Adobe or Google Cloud that can work across your platform, rather than requiring many different partners. Keep in mind, standardizing on one platform does not mean losing flexibility.

4. Remember that it’s all about flexibility

You will want to be sure you select an ecosystem where you can scale up or down based on your needs, and you won’t get locked in. A SaaS offering like Adobe can offer many advantages. However, you will want to avoid “getting stuck in the cloud.” If you add a solution such as Red Hat OpenShift to your ecosystem, you will get the benefits of cloud and you can run it anywhere.

5. Make sure to leverage analytics

Consider an experience management platform with a data layer built directly into the site. This data layer exposes analytics data about your users that you can leverage for deeper understanding of customer interactions. The information you gain from your data can help you drive more personalized experiences for your customers, targeting key promotions and specific content based on their interests.

6. Consider engaging a third-party advisor

A consultant can help you evaluate your needs, address your pains and select the appropriate solutions provider to achieve your goals. A company with a holistic perspective and decades of experience across marketing and the data center in dozens of industries can help move you ahead more quickly than if you were to go at it alone.

The key to a great customer experience 

When striving for agility in your digital marketing environment, the more you can align quick and efficient marketing options to your go-to-market plans, the better off your customers will be. Using a digital marketing platform that offers the flexibility of the cloud along with data and analytics services will allow you to create stronger customer personas, send targeted marketing, and provide personalized customer service rather than a “one-size fits all” approach. And that is the key to creating a digital experience your customers will appreciate.