Digital Challenge
Welcome, I wholeheartedly expect this edition to tank, hopefully not because you’ve already had enough of hearing from me, but because it’s holiday season, I wish you a well-earned restful break.
As I looked back on last month’s post it seems now a distant age from the Euros and election. With new changes at the head of both, let’s hope for some positive change.
This month we shine a light on the importance of analysis in digital, it is so common that our clients expect to buy an answer, and not only that, the answer. Often, without really being clear on what the question is, or that the question may change.
I have read many briefs over the past decade. Not only is it my professional responsibility to spot the gaps, I can help organisations find the right approach to patch them, but it all depends on their desire for that approach.
With the strange dance that is the sales process, some clients go silent and disappear, others thank us for the input to help them build a brief so they aren’t “comparing apples to oranges” (actual quote from a potential client recently).
And others still have even engaged us with reducing our account in favour of a new hire, “can you help us build a job description for this role?” Sure, you’re the client after all.
Quick aside: One of the new ways I have been using AI recently is for gap analysis, checking for facts is a very robotic type of job, isn’t it? To get good advice, you will need to get your prompts right – I suspect “prompt engineering” will probably become the mainstay of many job roles and interviews over the next decade.
Here’s a guide to prompting something like ChatGPT:
- Preposition the AI to be an expert in the field you want (you are a…)
- If you have customer/persona data then hand it that context
- Ask it to digest something step by step
- Compare two things: documents, webpages, whatever you need
I never fail to get useful feedback, whether that reassures me I have covered things off or have gaps to fill.
Anyways, regardless of the quality of your briefs (no not those ones!), one thing remains consistent: making a positive change involves seeing things differently. Every client and every brief inspires me because they align with one of my core values – belief in potential.
Belief in the change is one thing, we also need a roadmap to get there and a measure of success, in order to do that, sometimes we have to take a step back and analyse our efforts.
To do this we have data, the double edged, digital sword.
We have some powerful tools at our fingertips. Beyond the classics like Analytics and Search Console, new free tools like MS Clarity offer recorded videos showing how users interact with our website. Also, if you use Gravity Forms for your website’s contact form, it can track how much web traffic has viewed and interacted with the form, providing an instant conversion rate for your website.
And on the flip side, social media companies are now some of the largest corporations in the world and hold more data points than the government, hence the amount of government data requests made each year, and with all of us being made “the product”, this data can be used for all manner of dark things.
Regardless of good or bad, too little or too much, ignore it at your peril.
Okay, a real life example…
You need a new website, then you shall surely get one! If your expectations are to be met then we need to be a little more specific. What is the goal of the website?
An increased aesthetic is often a key driver by at least one stakeholder, but without data how will this be judged? And what is the point of it looking better?
Good design increases the likelihood of conversion, measure the conversion rate of your website, and you can set a goal that the new website must convert at x% increase.
Deciding on the parameter for success makes benchmarking the current performance all the more important, so it may be poignant to consider what tools we are using to measure conversion currently? And if there aren’t any, then we need to give it as long as possible to build a fair comparison
Conversion is an easy metric to set because few people within an organisation want fewer potential customers from their marketing efforts.
We can all be hasty for success, it is important to realise it isn’t just your website that’s the problem, it isn’t whether they came from Instagram or X, it isn’t just the content on offer along the way or the various interactions with you or your team – it is, of course, all of these.
In digital production, an agile approach has been proven the best way forward for many years. This is a way of working in small iterative sprints, basically, to do the minimum amount you can, and test it as often as you can.
It enables fluidity of changing direction, new ideas, and perhaps most importantly protects your budget.
Not all the organisations I talk to treat their marketing in the same way and very few treat their brand in this way – yet how can we define: mission, vision, values and marketing tactics once and expect to get 100% right first time, or that an organisation won’t change any of these as it evolves?
So, if you have stepped out of your comfort zone and not felt the impact you needed, don’t despair, every marketing funnel has leaks in it, work down the funnel, tackle them one at a time and set a metric to measure it against.
It would be mad to throw the funnel out and head to the store to buy another leaky one.
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