Omni channel digital strategy

OMNI-CHANNEL DIGITAL

STRATEGYTips and tools for an effective digital

strategy

What is Omni-channel digital

strategy

Acquiring digital users from many channels -

social, enterprise, support, mobile, partners.

How do you make sure they stay engaged

Personalize content and increase stickiness

Strong forum with very little moderation

Offline events to identify and engage -coupons, events - touch points to drive people offline and then come back and contribute online

Simple and unified messaging across all channels - either quick response or quality service along those lines

Converge digital strategy to business strategy - never let it run autonomously

Personalize content

Personalize Content

Thumb Rules:

Make it current and relevant. Make it sticky for the user Get feedback and improve

When you , as a business, are acquiring digital contacts from multiple channels, there is no way you could serve content that could be relevant to every one.

Personalize the content based on the user profile information.

More information we have regarding a digital contact, more personalized the content can be.

Personalize Content Make it current and relevant

The content that we have should be personalized and current. For example, if I expect the media to be connected with me and not share some of the recent information online, that becomes tough.

The media expects any information that can be shared with the external world to be available to them - either in terms of press releases or generic press kits.

Make sure that the information is available to them easily when they try to connect with you

Make it sticky for the user

Help the user relate with the content. Organize the content based on what the digital contact would want to do.

For example, if I am a retailer and intend to connect with my customers by offering them recipes, i should allow them to download recipes, share them and interact with the recipe

Interacting with the content - sharing , rating, comments etc - helps the customer relate to the content and helps us serve better content to the user

Get feedback and improve

This is something that all organizations need to do irrespective of whether we want to have a better digital strategy

Collecting feedback - or even listening to digital contacts - gives us better ways of connecting with them

Make it easy for them to provide feedback and show them that you are listening. Show them progress on any feedback that they might have given you

Have Strong Forums

Have Strong ForumsKey Practices:

Have relevant content Have your customer care

interact with your digital connections in the forums

Keep it lightly moderated Encourage digital

connections to connect to one another

Identify and recognize most active digital connections

Run regular campaigns to keep your digital connections engaged

How do you know that your digital connections are engaged?

One of the most effective and popular ways it to have a forum. A forum is a discussion board on your website or a social site that acts as your forum

Organizations that have omni-channel strategy make sure they have internal forums and forums on several social sites. They make sure that the forums are inter-operable

Have Strong Forums

Have relevant

content Relevant content is what gets

the digital connections come to

the forums.

To start with, organizations

would not know which content

is relevant

Over a period of time, digital

connections would start

trending over content that is

relevant to them

Customer care interact

with digital connections People like it when they get

responses from the customer

care of an organization

It helps to have your customer

care respond to the queries

from digital connections

Have Strong Forums

Keep it lightly moderated Moderation helps. However,

sometimes it becomes annoying when you see multiple replies in forums deleted

The better way is to make sure to keep it lightly moderated or moderated with the users themselves

That way, it becomes easier for the users to interact with each other

Customer care interact with digital connections There are digital connections

who would want to know things that are either common knowledge amongst your existing users or things that are frequently asked questions

It helps organizations since it shows that the digital connections are engaged

Have Strong Forums

Identify and recognize most active digital connections Always recognize your most

active digital connections

Allow your partners to be engaged with your customers. It makes it easier for the customers to understand your support network and your partners would also have more increased traffic.

Build it like a platform so that all of the digital connections can benefit

Run regular campaigns

to engage connections

Finally, this is the most

common practice

Have regular campaigns to

keep the digital connections

engaged

Keep things interesting and

active

Connect with online connections offline

Connect with online connections

offline

Benefits:

An opportunity to understand them better

Meet-ups used as forums for user research

Offer something that is exclusive and relevant. A ticket to annual event or music event could keep them engaged

Market the events – to engage online connections , drive any offline connections online as well. This will become self-reinforcing

Organizations cannot be run completely online or offline. It has to be a hybrid.

Digital strategy cannot be completely online. It is not possible to have engaging digital connections online

Organizations have to create opportunities to interact with their digital connections offline. There are several ways in which you can connect with digital connections offline

Some of the examples are a retailer organizing a specific wine tasting event just for their online connections or an organization giving passes to their annual meet free or giving some of their merchandise free. A few other organizations have also thrown parties where they have tried to make sure that they interact with their digital connections

Have simple and clear messaging

Have Strong Forums

Few Reasons

Omni-channel digital strategy , unlike marketing campaigns, tend to be for long periods and need a different level of focus. This is not easy to attain with multiple messaging for each segment

Digital strategy tends to adapt based on how the users change and pull relevant content

Digital strategy tends to dilute the messaging. Subtle messages or clues and ambiguous statements do not help. Neither do disclaimers.

Any organization that has ever run a marketing campaign or has engaged a marketing partner would know that they need to have a clear and directed messaging strategy when targeting users through multiple channels

However, this does not work well when translated to obi-channel digital strategy. There are a few reasons why this does not work well for omni-channel digital strategy

Have Strong Forums

Good Practices:

Simple message that is more relevant to the organization than the user segment

Messages that help send across a single trait of the organization. This helps it easier for connections across any channel to connect to the organization

The digital strategy can keep changing . The message tends to stay the same , helping digital connections make sense of new direction or action the organization is taking.

What helps when you are looking at omni-channel digital strategy -specifically with respect to messaging - is what feeling or image does your organization evoke in your digital connection’s minds.

This is the reason why digital strategy is not something that can be easily consulted on by external agencies or a clear plan of action be provided for the organization to be put in motion.

Drive digital strategy based on business strategy

Drive digital strategy based on business

strategy

Reasons:

Organizations that have not had an IT

department tend to invest more on

them to catchup with their competitors

This leads to a more skewed digital

strategy

Omni-channel digital strategy cannot be driven in isolation.

This is one of the most common practices that organizations use. However, the reasons these happen is because of the way most organizations are structured.

Drive digital strategy based on business

strategy

Practices to avoid:

Having a silo-ed digital strategy -

disconnected from the business

strategy

Having a digital strategy that fails to

relate to the digital connections - Most

of this series is related to that

A digital strategy that tries to catch-up

to the competition

Best Practices:

Digital strategy should always be in

tandem with the organization’s

business strategy.

Digital strategy should be used as an

enabler

A sound digital strategy includes

planning for pivots in your business

model based on your digital strategy.

For more information on pivots, refer

to this post here.

About the Author

The author is a lead consultant / agile coach at Thoughtworks and has 10

years of experience in software delivery – 5 of which has been with

enabling enterprise adapt agile.

The author regularly writes at www.madhavanwrites.blogspot.com