4 smart strategies for dominating digital moments

By Hannah Grap, Interim CMO, Sitecore

Digital engagement is a must-have for every customer-centric business. Ever-evolving customer expectations require brands to create more seamless and convenient experiences across a growing number of channels. Adding to this complexity is the expectation to provide personalization and relevance with every interaction.

Depending on where a brand is in its digital journey, there are four strategies it can consider that will help stand out and stay ahead of the competition.

Before diving deep, brands should outline their business priorities first and then review opportunities across technology, content, experience, and data, to help future-proof the customer experience (CX). Let’s explore these opportunities in detail to see how brands can better dominate digital moments.

1. Re-evaluate your technology stack

Technology is the gateway to your customers, to scaling your efforts, and creating a brand experience that stands out from the rest. But to make the most of it, brands should ensure their tech stack is adaptable to the ever-changing customer demands and behaviors.

Many brands still use monolithic technologies that often turn out to be unreliable due to their lengthy implementation, complex integrations, or other roadblocks. To address these pain points, brands should rethink their approach to technology, how it supports business needs and whether a composable tech stack can help accelerate outcomes. To get started:

• Identify where the gaps or challenges in your brand experience are and whether your software can support you in solving these. If there are gaps, consider point solutions that can integrate into your existing stack.
• Identify any roadblocks you may have that prevent your organization from easily integrating new applications within your existing digital experience solutions.
• Focus on preparing your tech stack to support the content, data and delivery demands that will arise with delivering new and personalized digital experiences.
• Make your internal users a top priority when planning your technology strategy.

Following these recommendations can help brands down a path that powers flexibility to grow and adapt to unique customer needs in the moment.

Eliminate barriers to internal collaboration

Internal teams are at the heart of digital experience workflows. If these teams are struggling to deliver connected customer experiences, then brands need to evaluate their foundational systems and processes to set everyone up for success.

As an example, content creation is critical to every digital experience, but systems and processes for content creation are often far from streamlined. Establishing a standardized content process within the organization to help speed up content creation is one way to quickly eliminate internal collaboration barriers slowing down delivery.

One company that has fostered better internal collaboration with a modern content solution is Michelin Guide. Michelin’s employees now rely on an efficient and modern workflow, where teams no longer need to manually convert images and are therefore able to roll out updates to the digital Michelin guides in minutes.

Get the most out of your content

Delivering consistent, real-time customer experiences depends on content availability and accessibility.

Organizing all content in a single platform allows teams to work from a centralized location and ensure that every experience aligns with the brand’s identity and can be more easily tailored to the desired customer experience. Centralization makes content easy to find and use and it means it is easy to repurpose for global or regional campaigns. Having a single source of truth will not only enable brands to develop and deliver content more efficiently but will help teams better the overall execution of the digital experience.

Aston Martin is one brand that has built a digital experience platform that has consolidated disparate sites under one domain and provides customers with a holistic experience. This means that customers can get the information they need, when they need it. The result - in the first year following the implementation, Aston Martin achieved a 64% increase in engagement in their target Chinese market.

Make data work for you

Delivering memorable brand experiences requires not only access to customer data but also the ability to develop experiences based on customer behavior in the moment. How can brands make sure that customers stick around for the long term?

Using advanced, real-time personalization will take them far. But to be successful, brands need to have the tools that enable them to work with a significant amount of data, as well as help them understand the context of each interaction. Unifying data can empower organizations with the right insights and tools to optimize customer events and segmentation.

For example, global retail JD Group uses Sitecore to gather data on product searches, product listing page performance and product recommendations to develop a seamless, personalized product experience automatically at every customer touch point. Improving the product merchandizing has allowed JD Group to serve millions of customers with personalized content and achieve an increase in average revenue per customer of 22%.

Every brand has a unique digital journey, but considering these four strategies can help brands determine a path that will allow them to future-proof their technology stack based on their existing digital journey, while delivering digital experiences that turn customers into loyal fans. Brands who make smart moves by prioritizing technology, internal collaboration, content, digital experience, and data, are sure to stand out from the crowd and dominate digital moments.