All Roads Lead to Brand Success

When running discovery calls for our web clients, they are often at an impasse as to why they're not succeeding as they'd expect. They have a quality product. Their brand is active on social media. They regularly send a newsletter. And their website is purchase-ready.

We often discover that the components of their marketing aren’t working together. 

 

For sci-fi readers, it's not so different from the concept of a parallel universe where we utilize strategies that fulfill consumers' needs by creating digital journeys that successfully allow our brand presence to be unified in a digital ecosystem. A digital journey is the pathway your brand builds across its digital channels for your customers to move from unawareness to purchase.

How does a brand provide a modern digital experience and journey for consumers that reinvests in the business?

First, it helps to develop a clear list of business goals and consumer goals to make sure our strategies and tools align with our needs.

 

 

Identify the business goals:

Identify the consumer goals:

Where is our brand present? Where is our audience at the moment that they are interacting with our brand?

A digital journey can begin from a digital kiosk, in another moment, browsing an online store, a quick wink from a digital advertisement, or across the country laying on the couch in a social feed doom scroll. By broadening our digital channels we offer consumers opportunities to begin their journey. Within each area of discovery we can surface affordances that deliver expected paths to our services.

Identify the channels:

 

We need to ask ourselves: how are we using these digital channels to engage audiences with opportunity? How are we fulfilling the consumer and business needs? Does the succession of our consumer need contribute to our business goal?

The previous work of identifying our different goals and channels are useful guides for developing our digital journeys in UX Strategy, say we have the business goal of doubling the number of product subscriptions by identified date. And our consumers have the goal of purchasing a product or service of similar nature. Based on research we’ve made the informed decision to be active in the following digital spaces: Instagram, TikTok, digital advertising, and our ecommerce website. With the decisions made, we can strategically create our paths to success. 

We can create an intentional path to purchase a subscription for our audiences that begins in each space. Starting with a digital advertisement audience, we have a short window to connect with a consumer's need and to deliver the critical affordances to lead them into our ecommerce experience. We provide our omnichannel set of services with the financial benefit to support our consumer need. How can you save by committing to a longer term of purchase? How can our subscription plan meet your lifestyle (bi-weekly, monthly, etc.) as a consumer? Taking deliberate steps to communicate the specific information and limited actions provides our audiences with the confidence to purchase and avoids derailing their objective (bounce rate, abandoned carts, etc.) to maximize the output of our business goal.

There are ample UX strategies at varied depths to uncover these digital opportunities in a brand. The fundamental pillars that can help bring the structure and clarity to build a brand's confidence towards an established digital journey begins with the needs of their consumers and business objectives. Establishing a foundation that identifies where our brand is present, the relationships between spaces, and actions to achieve our defined goals, ensures we synthesize our discovery, research, and objectives into a natural product experience.

The more we can strategically create an affordance in each digital moment, the better we can guide people on a digital journey between platforms to fulfill consumer needs and obtain our business goals. Clarity in understanding our goals drives confidence in providing a successful digital journey.