What You Get Out of Digital Experience (DX) Research & Strategy Consulting
If you’ve read our previous blog post, “Symptoms You Need a New Digital Strategy,” you may have seen some of the less obvious symptoms that your current digital strategy needs new research. But, if you’d like to understand more about what you really get out of digital strategy research, how you use it, and what it can change for your business, let’s get to it.
Let’s talk deliverables. When you invest in digital strategy research, the first thing you’re going to get is research, but that varies widely, person-to-person and company-to-company. But, what follows is a good guideline of what you need from your strategy partner to take you from not knowing what makes one potential action better for your business than another to having a clear, defined plan of action.
Understanding of your key audiences: Your best customers, your growth customers, and your future growth customers. Those become your primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences for your content strategy, and each needs to be treated differently. That’s where the research comes in. The research tells you how to reach them, where to reach them, and what messages resonate with them, so that you can build a scalable, one-to-many marketing approach that feels tailored to each individual. And, it takes a lot of data to get to that level of granularity which is why our research always includes qualitative and quantitative data. This information is provided in a presentation format to key stakeholders, allowing for questions and discussion. Deliverables can be provided in either presentation and/or report format, depending on how stakeholders prefer to consume and use information over time. The tactical use of the information is provided in subsequent deliverables to facilitate action aligned with the strategy.
Understanding of your competitive advantage in digital: Companies have some understanding of their value and potentially their competitive advantage; however, over time, the needs of their customers change, but the belief in the value companies create for them doesn’t change as often as it should—because they simply don’t invest in continuous research. But, even if supported by recent research, it is so rare to find a company who has done the deep and broad research necessary to determine what a company’s unique value is they create specific to digital experiences. What usually occurs is some Voice of Customer research that tells a company why people bought them, why they continue to use them, and then the company compares to that to some competitive research which they see as defining their uniqueness. That then becomes the “competitive advantage,” and how it’s used in digital is a message that plays out over-and-over again in online and offline content—treating both experiences and users of those experiences as if they’re exactly the same.
They’re not. They may not even be close to the same. For a company to successfully leverage all the value they can get out of digital, and more importantly, all the value they can create for their customers through digital, online and offline customers have to be researched independently, then those customer journeys must be mapped to show behaviors, wants, and needs of various groups, and how to support them along those journeys to create a seamless path across interactions. And, it requires extensive research into your competitors and industry to define what is truly unique value you can provide for your customers in digital. So, from the research, you should expect to receive understanding of what your competitive advantage is from a digital perspective and how to leverage that advantage more, so you attract, grow, and retain more of the customers you want.
Understanding of the gaps in the content you have and the content you need to create: Auditing content is no fun. It’s tiresome and even tedious work, and that’s for content strategy experts who have done the audience and competitive research to understand what to look for, how to evaluate it, what’s salvageable and what needs to go. Further, content audits can create some sensitivity if the content creators are part of the research project. But, it’s necessary. And, it’s not just a review of the content but of the analytics tied to the content. Not only does analytics provide indications of the content that’s resonating with your primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences (and what’s not), but more importantly, it also surfaces all the old, tired content that no one was aware was still out there and needs to be taken down. A content audit is typically delivered in spreadsheet format and details all the content your company has online across channels and publishers, and it provides you additional information that can define potential areas for improvement (alt-image text, missing metadata, and more). So, the first part of understanding you need from your digital strategy provider is to get a thorough content audit.
The second part you should expect to receive is a content map which includes all of the content your strategist recommends you keep and it defines new content you should create, the audiences it connects to, the channels to publish in, and which type of media to use for its publication. Depending on your level of engagement, the content map can also serve as an editorial planner for content publishing.
Detailed personas tied to your business objectives: When poorly researched, personas can be so loosely-defined as to be unusable. But, when tied to specific business objectives, such as customer growth objectives, your personas become powerful because they are defined based on your primary (current best customers), secondary (near future growth customers), and tertiary (further future growth customers) audiences. Now, what you have are clearly defined wants, needs, and preferences across content, channels, products and services. These personas can be leveraged in your editorial planner to ensure that the content you’re creating supports your best customers while growing your near future and far future growth customers in a strategic, systematic way. Personas are typically delivered in a presentation that can be easily revisited over time by marketing, product, sales, and service teams.
Detailed customer journey maps reflecting current experience gaps: For growth in credit unions and regional banks, you need detailed customer journey maps to illustrate how customers are interacting with your company online and offline, where they’re going, why, friction they experience across channels and switching from one channel to the next. Then, once you have your current experience mapped, you need the future state of your customers’ journeys mapped, using your defined business objectives (which could be growth across different personas, improved customer sentiment, increased customer self-service, and more). This aligns your future state customer journey to the objectives your company wants to achieve. This is how you stop investing in digital projects that never deliver the results you expect. Similar to personas, customer journey maps, delivered in presentation format, provide ease-of-use as marketing, product, sales, and service teams revisit them over time.
Defined metrics and how to capture them: “Hope is not a strategy” is a quote attributed to multiple leaders from athletics to the military, but when it comes to investments in technology, it could not be more accurate. Your digital strategy should include recommended metrics, uncovered through the data you’re capturing, the data you should be capturing, and how you should be capturing it. Without it, how will you know what to change, improve, tweak, or lean further into? Your digital strategy should be built in a way that gives you all the levers you can pull to adjust and improve continuously over time. This not only gives you the understanding of what’s delivering on investment, but it gives you the data strategy to leverage as you launch new content, products, services, and experiences. High-level recommendations for metrics are typically provided in presentation format for socialization and consumption among marketing, sales, service, product, and technology teams.
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