A strategic roadmap will help you identify the most relevant and impactful content, tools, and approaches that can be used to tailor your customer's journey with your brand and generate leads.
Activation

A 3 Part Strategy for Personalized Digital Experiences

Jaime Escott - 5 Min read

A strategic roadmap will help you identify the most relevant and impactful content, tools, and approaches that can be used to tailor your customer's journey with your brand and generate leads.

Set Up, Ramp Up, and Keep Up

The importance of having a clear strategy when creating an effective digital experience for your customers cannot be understated. A strategic roadmap will help you identify the most relevant and impactful content, tools, and approaches that can be used to tailor your customer's journey with your brand and generate leads. With thoughtful customization and continuous optimization, businesses can reach out to a broader range of customers, better cater to existing customers, and increase overall growth. Having a clear strategy that outlines the steps you will take is the key to success. To outline your plan of attack, Boston Digital suggests looking at it as a three-part strategy, which is really more of a continuum consisting of a set up, ramp up, and keep up period. A well-planned strategy gives users the opportunity to have meaningful interactions with your brand, deepening the connection and furthering their journey towards becoming lifelong customers.

Set up

The set up phase focuses on creating a sophisticated awareness-focused content strategy. It Is crucial to be very intentional about the types of content your company is publishing in an effort to reach as many potential beneficiaries of that content as possible. For most businesses, content would benefit from segmentation and tailored messaging as the products and or services your business provides can be mapped to various audiences. To create truly effective content, the topics should impact each of the audiences differently. Each product or service has different problems, solutions, or needs that are associated with them, therefore the information needs associated with each topic can help to multiply the reach of your content opportunity almost exponentially. To ensure the audience is consistently receiving the right content at the right time the content should be broken down across articles that are more informational in nature for the top of the funnel and more immersive content designed for users later in the journey to help strengthen the experience between the audience and your brand. Additionally, during the set up period, you should assess how well-defined your customer journeys are. Make sure that there are touchpoints along the journey that allow customers to easily discover, consume and interact with your brand. You can also use this time to analyze existing data sources and determine how they can help inform decisions when developing an effective digital experience. Finally, assess what technology systems need to be integrated or updated to ensure customer journeys remain consistent across all devices. Essentially, this phase begins the process of speaking to audiences in a variety of segments, laying a foundation for a much more personal experience.

Ramp up

The second step in developing an effective digital experience is the ramp up period. This portion of the continuum focuses on activating upon the personalized content consumption data that we’ve begun to collect in the set up phase. Here, the content consumption data is used to indicate where users are in their customer journey and adjust the messaging accordingly. One of the most intimate ways to create deeper experiences is by speaking to users throughout the various phases of their customer journey by mapping the messaging to the phases of the journey for the different products and services you have in market. In addition to refining messaging, it’s important to consider which channels to speak to users on. This includes search and retargeting efforts, both paid and organic. Organic efforts will help to boost awareness while paid efforts will help to ensure that the right users are being targeted with relevant content. By taking into account the various elements of both the set up and ramp up period, businesses can create a personalized customer journey that will help drive growth. Additionally, by optimizing campaigns in real time you can deliver even better experiences as time goes on. During this phase, it’s essential to measure success metrics including click-through rates, cost per click, and conversions. Adjustments should be made based on the results to ensure maximum effectiveness. Also during this time, experimentation should be encouraged as different strategies may work better for different audiences. Lastly, by creating user segments (based on customer journey stages) marketers can deliver unique campaigns and messages tailored specifically for each group. When taken together these tactics will form the core of an effective digital marketing strategy that caters to each individual user's needs.

Keep up

The keeping up phase is the ongoing phase of a digital strategy, where processes that have been established in the earlier setup and ramp up phases are refined and improved upon to meet the learnings that were obtained. This requires a holistic measurement plan to understand what elements of the strategy are working well, and which require adjustment. To do so requires activating upon 360-degree views of customer segments to help generate momentum and create a positive feedback loop. The end result is a highly actionable data ecosystem that can help build a flywheel of momentum that we've begun to lay the groundwork for during both the setup and ramp up phases of the project. This phase is an ongoing process as you continually analyze customer interactions across all channels to uncover pain points, monitor trends, uncover potential new opportunities, and ultimately craft an ideal experience tailored to each individual user. As the phase continues the focus shifts to creating a balance between staying consistent with the strategy while still allowing the flexibility to respond quickly to changing user needs. In order to do so, continual testing needs to be done with existing strategies as well as new experiments—this will ensure success moving forward as technologies and user needs evolve. The goal during this phase is to establish a loyal relationship with users through personalized interactions and offerings as you continually hone and perfect the digital strategy, making it more effective and efficient over time.

Hopefully, the set up, ramp up , and keep up methodology resonates with you. By following the action plan, you can develop personalized customer journeys that are tailored to your business’s needs. Implementing this strategy will help you create a more effective digital experience for your customers. The goal of this methodology is to impact your business in four ways. We're trying to have a communications impact, which will influence the brand impact, which will influence your marketing impact and ultimately have business impact.