How to create a digital customer experience strategy.

A digital strategy is the core of any customer experience strategy. It’s the foundation on which an effective, engaging, and enjoyable experience can be built. The digital strategy should include objectives, goals, and KPIs to measure success. It also needs to identify all stakeholders, prioritize user needs and set a timeline for delivery.

Technology plays a major role in digital strategy and should be leveraged to create a great experience for customers. Technology can help deliver seamless customer journeys, personalize interactions, and automate tedious tasks. It’s important to note that technology is an enabler for experiences—it’s not the end goal.

There’s an old adage about technology: it’s easy to make something complex, but it takes work to make something simple. This is especially true when creating customer experiences online. It’s important to focus on delivering the simplest possible experience that meets user needs, while also leveraging technology in a smart way.

What is a digital strategy?

A digital strategy is a plan that organizations use to define their goals, identify their target audience, and create a roadmap for how they will use digital channels to achieve their objectives.

Why is creating a digital strategy so important?

A digital strategy is important because it helps businesses to focus on their goals and to create business models to achieve them. A digital strategy also offers a way to track their progress and make necessary changes to their digital initiatives while creating in an agile environment.

Digital customer experience (DX) versus customer experience (CX).

The terms “digital customer experience” (DX) and “customer experience” (CX) are often used interchangeably. However, there’s an essential distinction between the two:

• CX is the overall customer journey, which includes a variety of channels ranging from traditional to digital.
• DX is focused exclusively on digital channels such as websites, mobile apps, and social media.

The customer journey should be considered when creating a digital strategy. It’s important to have a complete understanding of the customer’s needs and preferences and to create an integrated plan that will ensure a smooth experience across all digital and traditional mediums. This includes providing personalized experiences tailored to each individual’s wants and needs.

The goal of both CX and DX is to provide an exceptional customer experience. However, the focus for each is slightly different. CX focuses on providing a cohesive experience across all channels that meets customers’ expectations and needs. DX, on the other hand, focuses on improving the digital user experience by providing more personalized experiences through websites, apps, surveys, and social media.

How to create a successful digital strategy.

A digital strategy is a process of using digital technologies to achieve business objectives. It involves the creation and execution of a business strategy to reach those objectives.

1. Define your business strategy and objectives.

The first step in any digital strategy is to define your goals or objectives. What are you trying to achieve?

• Are you looking to increase brand awareness?
• Drive more traffic to your website?
• Increase online sales?

Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start to develop a digital strategy to reach these goals.

2. Understand your customer’s needs and wants.

The first step in any digital strategy is a clear understanding of your customer. What are their needs and wants? How do they want to interact with your brand identity? On which digital platforms are they most active? What are their pain points?

You can’t create a successful digital strategy without first understanding your customer. Once you understand your customer, you can start to create a strategy that meets their needs.

Social media offers a great opportunity to connect and ask questions in the form of polls. See what your followers think—they will appreciate your consideration.

3. Research your competition.

You can learn a lot from your competition. This competition research process allows the ability to learn more about the currently known competition and find new competitors.

See what they’re doing well and where they’re falling short. Examine the approaches being used and see if there are any unique strategies or tactics you can take advantage of. This research will give you a good idea of what to do and what not to do with your digital strategy and customer experience.

4. Create buyer personas.

Creating buyer personas is one of the most important steps in developing your digital strategy. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data derived from your existing customers.

When you create buyer personas, you can better understand your target audience and what they want and need from your business. This information can help you create targeted and effective marketing campaigns, website content, and product offerings.

To create buyer personas, you’ll need to gather data about your current customers. Personas can be made by researching your current audience. Next, research your market share and compare this information to that of your competition which can help you weigh your decisions based on their results.

To bolster your research, you can create surveys, record interviews, and crunch website analytics to learn more about your target audience and their main interests. Once you have this information, you can create detailed profiles for each of your buyer personas.

5. Map out a customer journey.

The customer journey is the path that a customer takes from becoming aware of a need or want to become a satisfied customer of your product or service.

Mapping out the customer journey can help you to identify pain points and to create strategies to improve your digital customer experience. There are a few different ways to map out the customer journey.

One method is to create a customer journey map based on customer journey analytics garnered from tracking your current website or app. You can learn more about Customer Journey Analytics and creating a digital strategy with Quantum Metric so that you can make data-driven decisions based on your customers’ main interests.

Once you have mapped out the customer journey, you can start to identify areas where you can improve the customer experience.

6. Develop an omnichannel approach for digital technology.

Omnichannel means being present and consistent across all channels where your customers are. This could include your website, social media, brick-and-mortar stores, mobile app, and more.

Your digital strategy should take an omnichannel approach in order to provide a consistent experience for your customers no matter how they interact with you.

An omnichannel approach can be difficult to implement, but by defining these pillars you will be set up for success:

• Channels: Which channels are most important to your business?
• Goals: What do you want to achieve with each channel?
• Audience: Who are you trying to reach with each channel?
• Message: What message do you want to communicate with each channel
• Tone: What tone do you want to use with each channel?
• Call to action: What do you want your audience to do after interacting with each channel?

Omnichannel is a complex topic, but these tips should help you get started on developing an omnichannel approach to your digital strategy.

7. Create content that resonates with your audience.

Your digital strategy cornerstone will be creating content that you’re sure will add value in the eyes of your target audience. Valuable content means understanding what visitors want to see and read and creating content that meets those needs. If you’re unsure, research how visitors have found you in the past and how visitors find your competition.

8. Optimize your website for search engines.

One of the most important aspects of your digital strategy is ensuring your website is optimized for search engines so that people can easily find resources when looking for information on the topics you cover.

SEO means using the right keywords, having well-written and informative content, and having a website that is easy to navigate. SEO involves optimizing your pages’ content, titles, and meta descriptions. There are many SEO factors to help search engines accurately classify each page such as:

• Page titles
• Page meta descriptions
• Page headers
• Keyword research
• Content relevance

Other SEO factors include page load speed and overall user experience. You might also consider actively building backlinks to your website from reputable sources to build Authority on a given topic. These backlinks will help search engines rank your website higher in the results pages when people search for relevant topics.

9. Implement marketing automation for new digital initiatives.

Marketing automation is the process of using software to automate marketing tasks. It can help you save considerable time and money by automating repetitive tasks, such as email marketing, social media, and lead generation, to be dispersed on a regular schedule.

Releasing content on a regular schedule is the key to success. Automation will help you save time and resources so that you can focus more on developing new content, researching potential digital initiatives, and connecting with customers.

10. Analyze and measure your results.

Now that you’ve implemented your digital strategy, it’s important to analyze and measure your results. Results will help you determine what’s working and what’s not and make necessary adjustments to improve your results.

There are a number of ways to measure your results, including web analytics, surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups. Choose the methods that make the most sense for your business and goals.

Once you have your data, take some time to analyze it and identify areas for improvement. Then, plan to implement those improvements and continue measuring your results.

By consistently measuring and analyzing your results, you’ll be able to make small tweaks over time that can greatly impact your success.

Developing an effective marketing strategy is essential for any business. By taking the time to research your audience, identify your goals, and by tracking your progress you can ensure that your marketing efforts are always working towards achieving your desired results.

We help you to recognize customer behavior and deliver the right experience at the right time.

Quantum Metric empowers these goals specifically through features like session replay, customer journey analytics, and data capture and visualization. For businesses wanting to reduce customer friction, optimize conversions, and harness real-time data, Quantum Metric ensures your visitors remain at the center of every interaction.

See firsthand how Quantum Metric will enable greater insight into your visitors. Request a demo today.