Digital Strategy – Part 4: Digital Roadmap

Digital Strategy – Digital Roadmap

We would discuss about on how to work on digital roadmap for any website.

We think of following areas.

Roadmap Approach

The following drivers shape decisions around the functionality and order of the deployment phases within the roadmap.

• Timely Results
• • Deliver grouped capabilities within reasonable stakeholder expectations
  • Deliver capabilities on a regular basis in a phased approach to demonstrate forward movement

• Priority Alignment
• • Focus on foundational aspects of the overall platform first
  • The capabilities delivered within the phases are aligned with the priorities of the stakeholders

• Manageable Effort
• • Take a crawl, walk, then run, approach to delivery
  • Account for the fact that the education and adoption of technologies takes time

Roadmap Phases

Prepare phases in which the site will be implemented. Each phase has core purpose that is encapsulated by a theme. So take example of few phases.

P1: New Website based on Sitecore CMS

Decided on features for Sitecore CMS like follows:

• Website redesign focused on creating an innovative, differentiated experience
• New content management system to support new requirements & technologies
• Enhanced Search Capabilities and Content Architecture
• Basic Personalization*

P2: Redesign of Micro sites

• An extension of the first of phase 1
• Roll-out the redesign to regions
• Enable Personalization for micro sites

P3: Enhanced Engagement

• Deeper two-way dialog with prospects, customers and partners
• Enhanced Marketing Automation & CRM Integration
• Launch of Social Media forum and Leader Board

Roadmap Timelines

Provide your customer with timelines for roadmap. Take follow as example.

 

 

Digital Strategy – Part 3: Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Digital Strategy – Key Performance Indicator  (KPI)

This is third in series of Digital Strategy where we will discuss about Key Performance Indicator (KPI) about any site after development. It is very important for your customers to find the ROI on their investing by reviewing the KPIs. It is prudent that you discuss and decide on KPI during digital strategy phase in starting.

Some of the key factors are followings:

• Traffic
• Links in from third party sites
• Google queries shows users are looking for this information
• Profile information captured
• Downloads
• Views of videos
• Increase in in-bound traffic from social media
• Log-ins
• Referrals

Digital Strategy – Part 2: Competitive analysis

Digital Strategy – Competitive analysis

This is second in series of digital strategy.

It is very important to perform due diligence before we actually conduct the digital strategy session with customer. This is highly important for digital strategist to move the needle for their customers in terms of providing the right strategy. In this session, we will discuss about benchmarks which we need to review before we actually conduct strategy sessions.

Identify competition – First and foremost important is to identify how your competitions are doing. They should be identified on right scale like they should not be 50 times bigger or smaller in terms of revenue. $ 500 million company should not be competition for $ 5 million company on most of the account.

Following are few areas which needs to reviewed for your competition.

Content Architecture – This is to review how the content is structured for competition sites so that content for your site can be structured in much better fashion.This is highly important so that visitors can find the right content in few steps.

Content Tagging – track through competition how they are doing in terms of content tagging. This helps in finding related content on different pages, providing the context to users and tracking user behavior through these tagging.

Personalization – Review how your competition doing in terms of personalization. This personalization based content helps in retaining your visitors.

Gated Content + Progressive Profiling – Providing content through gated channel help to gather as much information as possible but do keep gated form with minimum fields in order not to lose your visitors. Test your competition as how they are doing in terms of providing their public facing assets to visitors. It is important that visitors should not face too much of difficulty in accessing your digital assets.

Analytic – It is very important to review the analytics of current site to gather the insights. These insights like bounce rate,  traffic volume, traffic growth year on year, unique visitors etc.

Social Media – To review how competition is performing social media wise. There specific areas in which sites are measured.

Strength	Sentiment	Passion	Reach	Visibility
How much is your brand is being discussed/mentioned online.	Positive feedback divided by negative feedback	The higher the number the smaller number of people talking about your brand	Unique identification by unique visitors	Number of mentions in the social sphere

It is always important to create rich social media site.

Search  – How effective if your competition’s site search. Are they using faceted search, type ahead etc?

Cons – Finding cons are as important as finding features from your competitions. There can be cons like no lead generation forms, no related content etc.

 

Digital Strategy – Part 1: Engagement

Digital Strategy  – Engagement

This series of blog posts will provide the insights on series of topics for digital strategy.

This first part helps in managing content for enhanced digital engagement.

• Premium content – Visitor should be server with premium content like articles from best authors, award wining case studies.
• Content Tagging – The content tagging (related keywords) is one of the best way to show users with right user journey to move through. Using content tagging  would further help users find the top used keywords on a site and improve SEO. Content tagging tools look at the content of the site and shows those words in a cloud and makes the more frequently used words bigger. It is recommended that sites use  content tagging or related keywords to increase site engagement and improve SEO.
• User Generated Content – Encourage visitors for user generated content through providing feedback, uploading, and sharing through social media feeds. Sites will be incentivised through content used (e.g. tweeted through twitter). Regularly updated information that can increase repeat visits, enhance the aesthetics of the site and the online visitor experience. It has green effect on the engine rankings.
• Content Testing  – It is always recommended to utilize A/B or multi-variant testing can help Mining maximize its content and interactions to ensure the right content or action at the right time during the site visit.
• Navigation – Once the site becomes content rich (using content tagging etc) it is imperative that users are able to find content easily. This includes Drop down and/or expandable menus to simplify navigation, Multiple navigation options etc.
• Email – This is one of the best way to engage visitors by delivering personalized content. Site should encourage to ask for this information.These registrants can quickly become leads for later acquisition.

 

Digital Strategy

Digital strategy is one of the first main activity for refreshing any site. This is to decide on key factors/features/objectives of your sites.

Some key features for site should be as follows:

• Audience Engagement – offer valuable information that allows your site to connect with visitors and help visitors connect with each other. The more engaged  to the site, the more value they will have with your brand.

• Rich social media features – having a social media rich site has significant amount of user generated content, keep them on the site, return often and most importantly, participate.
• Personalize through social – add social login to make it very easy for users to register and return to the logged in state. Also allow user to share the content. This digital footprint will give site the ability to personalize the site to the user and deliver very relevant information that resonates with each.
• Drive interaction – Provide drivers to facilitate interaction with other and features like directories, users lists, gamification, voting, quizzes, expert advice, and leader boards to create neediness to the site encouraging visitors to come back often and stay longer.
• Keep engaged through email profiling – Send email with right information to visitors to encourage them to come back. Build a trust and relationship with Site, mature the relationship based on response/feedback. But please note that don’t overdo sending emails as this can backfire.
• Data collection – Collecting visitor data for intelligence purposes will allow site to integrate content into a lead nurturing strategy through existing systems like Salesforce and Eloqua.