First, set your online business goals. Digital marketing can require a complete overhaul. As eCommerce activity rises, consolidating a customer base in this new format means reaching a wider audience. The business goals are the benefits of user experience design.
Align business and marketing goals.
Goal-setting adds practicality to your vision. It encourages you to evaluate your business’s current and potential future state. Specific goal setting leads to quantifiable goals and concrete steps.
Dreaming big for business expansion is essential. Aligning marketing and business goals is a good start, but they are different. Consider your marketing strategy a powerful weapon for achieving a corporate goal. You want to increase revenue by 20% from last year. How can marketing improvements fill a 20% revenue gap?
If you’re struggling to set actionable marketing goals based on your business’s growth, try these:
- Increase new customer sales
- Cross-sell to existing customers deepening brand loyalty
- Boost brand awareness
- Personalize content
- Increase market share
- Create a new product or service
- Improve customer relations and experience
- Increase profits
- Customize the steps into quantifiable goals
Track What Works
Any experiment must track performance. If goals and techniques don’t work, it may be time to try something else. There are many marketing tools to assist you in expanding your firm, but digital marketing has a few key areas.
Customer Journeys
First impressions matter. Track all user interactions from engagement to purchase to post-purchase. Customer journeys reveal how customers regard your business (UX), and journey maps depict the steps with visual aids.
Identify your target audience, define personas, and interview target populations. Then corroborate customer motives, ambitions, purchase behaviors, and other behavioral factors. Marketers can empathize with customers by developing behavioral stages based on a rough journey map.
A user journey typically follows general stages:
Awareness
Research Assess/Compare
Decide and Fulfill
Utilize and Assess
A potential consumer may start by comparing products, services, and companies. After choosing one, the customer will likely watch their experience and support. The complete experience will shape brand loyalty or not.
Companies must determine target groups’ wants and ambitions to build loyal customers. This understanding should improve their marketing strategy for sales and brand loyalty. Digital formats make this more data-intense but enable marketers to package information to match customer journey stages deliberately. Customer journeys differ from city streets, where customers go from A to B. Journeys are cross-country road trips with rest stops, potholes, missed exits, and possibly a breakdown. We must simplify the journey. Price alone can prompt product comparison, reviews, and purchasing rationale. Find ways to shorten a customer’s sales conversion path.
Good digital marketing surfaces a customer’s journey and provides a clear path to the goal.
A virtual trail shows a customer’s journey’s complexity. Clickstream data analyzes user demands, motivations, interests, and friction points beyond capturing clicks, navigation points, and other user activity. This data provides insights to improve the User Experience (UX) and e-commerce marketing—clickstream analytics show where the website influences customers. Digital marketers value the order web pages are visited more than their popularity. Website conversion paths should be clear. If the site offers options instantly, users may not buy depending on their customer journey. Or, they may buy or select the recommendation immediately when AI behavioral analysis delivers what the user wants.
Experimentation tools are essential to assess the optimal UX solution to maxiimize business results.
IT Architecture
Information architecture impacts customer satisfaction. Architecture involves structuring your site for readability, navigation, and aesthetics. Website structure is crucial to finding, comprehending, and engaging with the website content.
Information architecture has four main parts:
- Information classification and organization structure
- Labeling systems: information representation and definition
- Navigating the information: navigation UI (user interface)
- Search capabilities facilitating how people find information quickly
CNN.com has superb information architecture. The news platform first displays the latest, most relevant news and organizes content into blocks for users to search by topic. (e.g., business, entertainment, tech). CNN’s homepage promotes a lot of stuff, but CNN organized it intuitively. Any website should follow this digital marketing tip. Consider your online experiences. How likely are you to stay on or return to a website if you spend more time figuring out the website vs. engaging with the product or service?
Customer Perspective Matters
Convenience defines consumer experience. Though it’s becoming a necessity, the Internet is a commodity that provides information quickly. Format, accessibility, speed, and presentation matter more in the digital age. These basic, integrated marketing strategy tweaks can significantly impact a consumer’s online brand experience, compelling them to select your service or buy your products. You can substantially impact user conversion and return customers.
