6. Envisioning Your Digital Strategy

When we say “get your strategy off the page,” we’re not talking about giving up presentations entirely. In today’s digital world though there are many companies that still conduct business in this now more traditional way but there is a more interactive, immersive way to proceed when it comes to digital initiatives.

Getting your strategy off of the PowerPoint page is about not only changing the game as to how you implement your digital strategy within your organization, but how you communicate it.

Once you begin to change the way you communicate your digital rollout with team members and other stakeholders, and, in turn, they adopt new communication tools, you will become more proficient at deploying newer, more effective strategies and tactics. As a result, you will develop a culture that is more agile and digitally transformative.

By implementing your initiatives using digital tools, you will get a better end result faster as you cut out those wordy slides and, instead, create working prototypes that will more effectively grab the attention and buy in from your stakeholders and, in turn, shorten your strategic planning and product development cycle dramatically.

Are they using smartphones to access your site? Do they want to? How much time are they spending in various social media channels? Do they prefer LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook? Are they active Instagram or Pinterest users? Do they prefer information about your product coming in an email, or would they rather connect with a webinar?

Knowing customer preferences helps you determine the delivery system that will best resonate with them. In the past, you may have used focus groups or surveys to understand how customers found you or purchased from you. Now, by creating a new model for profiling your audience, you can define what touchpoints, channels, and devices they use, as well as accumulate a variety of data about them. Knowing where and how customers find you is important because that’s where you’ll be communicating with them most. Those channels will also dictate how you communicate—video versus mobile app for instance.

Digital communication by its nature is what we call a “visually tactile” concept—meaning understanding the digital communication results from experiencing it in whatever model a company chooses to use to express itself.

For example, Nike doesn’t say, “Tell your friends about us.” They give you a wearable or a mobile app that lets you easily send your friends updates, photos, and data about your run. They know it’s hard for most people to visualize a 5K run, so they provide an app with a digital map, with your 5K run progress lit up like a neon pathway. The customer can see at a glance that they did indeed bust it running around Central Park and back home, and they can choose to share that with select friends.

So, with all the tools, apps, and devices that make it possible to inspire, amaze, astound, and astonish, why do so many companies continue to communicate their strategy with a text wall of “corporate-speak” and PowerPoint presentations?

When was the last time you were inspired by a PowerPoint presentation to the point you wanted to laugh, cheer, or stand up and run a mile? More importantly, when’s the last time you wanted to share a PowerPoint presentation? Yet, if a friend were to message you a challenge to compete with them in a new weight loss contest, how tempted would you be to text back and say “bring it!?”

Your customer is either experiencing a rush of desire to engage with you in some way, or they’re looking for someone else who will. Which will it be?

While older communication methods can be adequate for certain outcomes, using tools that create newer forms of digital assets can be transformational for your organization. These tools aren’t just novel toys or cool apps. They’re how a digitally native population, that includes employees as well as customers, communicate.

When an organization’s team members become familiar with these new tools, it will influence the culture of your organization. These tools drive accuracy, which forces a shift in mindset that’s more conducive to a digital transformation.

Think about when they engage. Are you a company they seek out when they’re traveling (hotel, gas station, restaurant), or on weekends (DIY, movies, entertainment, clubs, bars). Are you a scheduled stop (dentist, doctor, accountant) or an impulse purchase (e.g., retail, entertainment, fast food).

Anytime you are defining strategies, align them with your goals, otherwise you may end up with a situation where users want to access content for free, but the business wants to make money on it. This is what happened with The New York Times when it kept jockeying between giving away all their content for free versus charging for everything and then not showing up in SEO searches.

Ultimately The Times created a kind of middle ground where they now give away about 10 articles a month. If a user wants more news or articles, he or she can pay for a subscription. This should be your goal—to find the right balance in order to create alignment. The Times is an example of a traditional business that is trying to transform itself.

Identifying and aligning the needs of users with your organization’s goals begins with creating and analyzing your customers’ daily journey map. Where do they find you? Organic or paid search? Word of mouth or advertisement? As a leader and communicator, your employees expect you to see patterns, trends, and business opportunities before they become evident to others.

Customers want and expect you to communicate with them in a way they understand and find seamless and simple. They’ll buy in when you make it easy for them to do so. Employees begin to buy in to your vision when you communicate it well enough that they get the vision and want to be part of it. Get people involved in the process, and they begin to take ownership. Deliver your vision and your strategy in an interactive format and it will be an easier sell. People will also be more willing to participate and contribute to the concept and the ideas if you give them access to the process in an agile way, where they can “own” the idea from the beginning.

Let’s say you’re delivering a strategy to your executive team, Board of Directors, whoever it may be. Instead of showing them a slideshow with bullet points and sketches, try handing them a workable 3D prototype where they can actually experience the future of the device or software. It might be an interactive graphic, a video representation, a 3D mockup from different vantage points, or even a colorful “map” of your proposed process. You don’t need a database or a polished prototype in the perfect color with the logo. All you need is a working prototype with strong components that function well enough to give your audience the chance to actually experience the idea or strategy firsthand.

By getting your executive team or board of directors involved with a working prototype in the early stages of digital development, you create a connection and desire in them to see the device finalized. The experience also sparks innovation, ideas, and participation.

After they’ve played with the device for a while they’re more likely to say, “What about adding _____,” or “What if we do _____?” They’ve stopped being passive, sideline observationalists, and started absorbing your vision and are now participating in the process, strategy, and development. And remember, you will be using agile methodology across your development team, so generating prototypes quickly should not be a problem.

• Review the goals for product or service.

• Gather your research: Interviews, surveys, logs, analytics, and other tools.

• Generate a list of touchpoints.

Creating a digital lens on top of their usage profile will allow you to see if the newer communication delivery system is more effective or not. If customers are visiting your site more frequently from a mobile device like a tablet, ask yourself why?

For example, take hotels that partner with neighboring restaurants, gyms, spas, and retail stores to offer their hotel guests a discount for shopping those stores. This may be the conduit that enables their traffic spiking with out-of-town shoppers.

IT issues can drive a spike in web traffic, but so can press releases, celebrity endorsements, weather, tragedy, a television show, or a mention in a popular blog can spike your traffic. So how can you ensure that your delivery system is best optimized for those visitors?

Because most digital experiences are multichannel, you want to map out your user’s journey. By using journey maps, you’ll recreate and understand their current informational experience and identify ways to modify or enhance it into a better one. Start with their current journey. Are there channels that have been bypassed but may now be effective? Could a message be strengthened or supported with an additional component or channel? Multiple touchpoints can reinforce a message for greater buy-in. Journey maps are about visualizing what you are seeing—whether it’s the clickable or experience prototypes. Is there a different route by which your viewers will have a more meaningful experience?

Take, for example, a digital initiative Nike reworked when their analytics revealed that their male and female users wanted different things in their apps and their journeys. So they launched Nike Training Club for Women, utilizing workouts, drills, and content targeted at women as a supplement for its Nike Women website.¹ They changed their strategy based on their customer’s journey map.

¹ http://mashable.com/2010/12/06/nike-training-club-iphone/

Keep researching your customer base. Pinterest, for example, has 80 percent more female users and draws 400 percent more revenue than Twitter.² Monitoring gender behavior isn’t about reinforcing gender stereotypes. It’s about using data to find out what really makes your audience tick. By using digital tools to continuously assess your users and their needs, you will gain a better perspective on their digital journey.

² https://www.sprinklr.com/social-scale-blog/targeting-genders-social-data-insights-stereotypes/

Understanding or creating a customer persona, such as the needs, goals, thoughts, feelings, opinions, expectations, and pain points of the user is helpful; as is defining the amount of time you expect a customer to spend with you. For example, a customer buying groceries is going to visit a grocery store website more regularly over time than one buying a car.

Create a finite timeline for the customer experience—from a day to a week, month, or a year. Take into account the emotional aspects of the journey—confusion, frustration, joy, pain, regret, buyer’s remorse, or celebratory feelings. Finally, note the touchpoints—what is the customer doing, and where this action is taking place? Are they emailing the company? Are they calling customer service with questions or complaints? Are they posting about their experience on social media, visiting the store? How and where are they interacting? Is the experience primarily digital or physical or both?

• Who is using the website?

• What the user wants to do?

• The user’s goal.

• The steps the user takes to accomplish a particular task.

• How the website should respond to an action?

Write the steps in a use case in an easy-to-understand narrative. First, identify an actor (customer), the basic flow of the event, and then the specific steps to the event, triggers for the event, and alternative scenarios for the event. Kenworthy outlines the following steps:³

³ http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/use-cases.html

1. Identify who is going to be using the website.

2. Pick one of those users.

3. Define what that user wants to do on the site. Each thing the user does on the site becomes a use case.

4. For each use case, decide on the normal course of events when that user is using the site.

5. Describe the basic course in the description for the use case. Describe it in terms of what the user does and what the system does in response that the user should be aware of.

6. When the basic course is described, consider alternate courses of events and add those to “extend” the use case.

7. Look for commonalities among the use cases. Extract these and note them as common course use cases.

8. Repeat the steps two through seven for all other users.

Once you’ve defined your Use Cases, you can map the user journey/experience within your communication structure, identifying stopping points, potential dead-ends, or abandonments as well as successful completion of a desired outcome: for example, a sale or a request for more information.

On the other hand, let’s say you implement an enterprise digital strategy that integrates all the bank’s digital units. Now bank users are able to have an integrated account-managed experience with a single sign on for all of their products with one content management system, and so on. This integrated model is critical because, otherwise, companies will continue to lose their customer base when they create redundant capabilities.

Enterprise digital strategy thinks about all the products and all the services an organization offers and works to house them in one location so that they don’t build redundant user experiences. Many of these kinds of redundant units are the case for a lot of banks. The business units will push back wanting to protect their turf. While they all know the key to digital maturity is centralizing offerings, too many banks are still late in becoming digitally adept.

Gartner predicts that this lack of digital business competence will cause 25 percent of businesses to lose competitive ranking by 2017. Furthermore, they say that CIOs and IT professionals who think digital business is synonymous with IT are going to be blindsided.⁴

⁴ http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2745517

In other words, if you don’t understand what digital strategy is, or how to utilize it, you’re not going to succeed in a digital marketplace. A digital strategy requires a thorough understanding not only of products and services, but of digital touchpoints, journey maps, technology, analytics, and company visions and goals. Before you can even begin to define your digital strategy, you have to understand it.

Following are considerations to take into account when defining your strategy:

• Start with your digital vision and objectives and align them with your goals.

• Set up measurements for the impacts of each initiative.

• Develop a concise process for rolling out your plan.

⁵ Skorupa, J. RIS, News Custom Research. (2013).Omnichannel readiness

If your strategy is to have people reorder your laundry detergent rather than try a new brand, think about putting a sensor on the bottle that alerts the owner that supplies are low. Or, follow Amazon’s lead—with the Amazon Dash—a button you press when you want to order more of something, whether it’s coffee, dog food, detergent, or vitamin supplements. Being able to have a working prototype helps you develop your strategy because you’re more likely to find additional touchpoints where you can reach your customers.

You still have to figure out the opportunity and the other elements of the strategic rollout, but at the end of the day, the best ways to present your ideas are in a much more visual form.

Text-heavy blog posts, white papers, and bulleted PowerPoint slides are harder to grasp, require the viewer to have a context, or create one, to understand the message. They’re also time consuming to prepare and read. That’s why infographics, charts, photos, and diagrams go viral and blog posts and texts and bullet-pointed PowerPoint slides turn into credenza-ware.

Seeing information in a format that provides concepts, facts, and data in visual soundbite sticks with us better because it is processed in our right brains—the creative side of the brain that processes information faster. Our right brain is the emotional side of our brain. When we make an emotional connection, it’s more powerful. We’re in alignment with the communication.

We can literally “see” how a concept works, as opposed to hearing it taught. In the case of abstract concepts, where there is no kinesthetic opportunity to experience the concept by “doing,” as you might be in a lab or in the field, the graphic presentation appeals to the strongest potential absorption process we have. This is also why prototypes and demos move people more than slideshows.

Audiences, including your employees as well as your customers, are sold when they get your vision and accompanying visual representation of the future of your new product initiatives. Your focus, therefore, should be on making it easy to not only see but to experience your vision. To best achieve this, you need to create a new model for digital transformation buy-in such as creating a working prototype, building out a clickable website, even something as simple as a concept model.

Digital is meant to be a light technology—meaning it should be easy to create prototypes in various channels. Whether it’s a design mock-up of a page or a clickable working prototype, you can get conceptual information in front of people quickly, and they, in turn, can absorb it faster. Building twenty manufacturing centers is a tough concept to prototype, but with digital, you can create clickable design mockups, cutaways and 3D renderings, and more. These tools convey the different aspects in a more holistic fashion. Prototypes can be anything from a quick sketch to a complex, proof of concept device that works. Implement rapid prototyping in the strategic planning process to iterate quickly rather than creating wordy PowerPoint files. This approach complements your strategy and accelerates buy-in. It doesn’t have to follow the long-form agency process. This quick prototyping also keeps participants engaged and regularly participating in generating ideas for the initiative. Here are the basic steps most prototypes go through during a series of iterations:

Dynamic planning recognizes that the mode of delivery is such a critical element of the message itself. Reaching customer touchpoints to establish that all-important emotional bond, which in turn will lead to a buying decision, is the endpoint of a dynamic planning strategy.

Some organizations spend millions on traditional design agencies. We’ve seen companies we’ve worked with spend a million dollars to get two pages designed. There was very little business strategy rethink. The agencies they worked with are among the most talented design agencies around. In terms of visual presentation, they make some of the most beautiful websites on the planet. Their product is probably equivalent to the work of a couple of very talented designers, but they initiate a whole process wrapped around their design efforts. That process costs lots of money.

You may have the greatest design in the world but if what’s missing is the business strategy, you’ve really got very little. Design is the very necessary after product. It’s similar to picking the right technology. There are a lot of solutions, but you have to figure out the right strategy first.

The old game of the CTO/CIO blaming poor performance on lack of the proper technology went something like: “We don’t have the right CMS,” or “Our web interface isn’t user friendly,” or “I can’t pull the data I really need.” Unfortunately, this is still the case in some organizations, but most have figured out that analytics is really more of a strategic, top-down issue.

Much of the time, the motivations for these misappropriations lie in political positioning within the organization, or failure within a team framework. One large organization in the publishing space, for example, had a situation where the CTO regularly sent complaints about the creative team to the CEO who found herself a world of angst as a result, not the sort of things a CEO should be focused on. The CTO was doing this because he was jockeying for the spotlight, pushing to show how all his projects needed to be the first things anyone thought about.

Technology in a digital initiative is a means to an end. It is a tactical aspect that supports an organization’s overall strategy. When there is a healthy organizational strategy that includes buy-in within the organization, it is a relatively easy matter to design and develop a digital strategy which promotes its objectives.

In the past, there were so many unknown factors in developing a quality digital team. But now, we are past the infant stage or even the adolescent stage of digital technology. Today’s technology is much more sophisticated, and yet it’s easy to find quality coders and designers. Instead of adapting to something new in the technology arena, it’s much more about strategic challenges. The combination of business strategy with strategic thinking about the user experience is bigger than a site launch or a redesign.

Change flows from strategy to tactical tools. Today, business is about asking smart questions like, “How are we changing our business in anticipation of changes we can see coming?” and “How are we positioning our messaging to address the issues our customers are facing today? Figuring out how to implement these changes on a website or even a mobile app is very secondary to changing the business itself. Changes in the delivery system need to reflect the strategic decision making that arises from properly assessing conditions, functions, and processes in and by which the business operates.

However, when it comes to mobile, there still are questions such as, “Should we have apps or responsive websites or both?” and “If we have both what goes in an app versus what’s in a responsive website?” and “If we have apps should we have one app with all of our features or an app for every feature?”

Companies and their executive teams can get really wound up in this kind of debate. Rather than creating a three-dimensional model of strategic transformation, they focus on managing individual business units who say they want to create an app, or a website, or some other digital asset. This hierarchical somersault can deviate drastically from any sort of overall strategic plan into a failure freefall.

Companies shouldn’t even try to debate these issues among themselves at the executive level. The goal of the executive team here should be to define the experience of the future. Once that vision is defined, it is the job of the digital transformation leaders to determine how it is broken down into different websites and applications. Your task as a leader is to define the objectives. Their task is to translate that definition into specific digital experiences. Your task then becomes evaluating the information gained from the transformation as to whether it met the strategic objectives, and then to make applicable changes for the best result possible in alignment with those objectives.

When this sequential process is adopted, the implementation of the vision is actually the easier part. You already know how your audience is approaching you for information and purchasing from your research on touchpoints, use cases and journey mapping. This information will determine what should be in your app, what should be in your website, what should be part of your social media outreach.

Should a single audience only want to deal with certain features, while another only wants to deal with other features, your team designs with those preferences at the forefront. This is where strategic opportunities meet digital user experience. Again, the goal for those leading the digital transformation is to be able to identify their differentiation and their consumer experience, not the entire consumer experience. Each company needs to focus on their experience, their digital DNA, and what sets them apart, not on what the other is doing so they can copy it.

• Identify resources within your organization that could be permanently or as needed assembled to form a rapid prototyping team.

• Challenge your team to present their next strategy in a visual way without PowerPoint.

• Layer digital data points on your customer segmentation to understand where your users may be engaging with your brand.

• Journey map your top user experiences.

• Publish your strategy on a social collaboration/Wikipedia-type platform that allows other employees and even customers vote, comment, and contribute.