Creating compelling, effective digital experiences is more than just having a website; it's about envisioning a digital world that embodies your brand, opens new avenues and conversations, and, most importantly, delivers measurable value to your audiences – and in turn your business.
Businesses often struggle to think holistically about their digital experiences and how they tie together with their brand, communications, and engagement strategies. Quite often, they’re an afterthought that take the backseat due to organizational challenges, internal ownership, or digital capabilities.
But applying strategic design thinking and innovative technology solutions are fundamental to driving growth and engagement and creating value. Consider these experiences as part of the wider brand system and overall transformation strategy. It’s this ecosystem that your key audiences – like employees, customers, talent, suppliers – most commonly operate and engage in. And if your experiences are not engaging, connected or valuable, your audiences are far less likely to return.
How effective is your digital ecosystem?
From your corporate website, to intranet, to brand management system to talent experience and beyond: do they mirror and amplify the values and essence of your business? Do they work together to drive value, engagement, and opportunity?
Think beyond their component parts and look at the synergy they create together as an ecosystem. Does that world paint a clear picture of your business and the values you represent? Are these moments where audiences touch your business creating the right memory? Your audiences should be able to feel the vision of your business.
In the modern world these digital experiences aren’t transactional; they’re transformational – this is the cornerstone to crafting a modern digital strategy that delivers true value.
To help identify engaging digital experiences, there are a few golden rules to follow.
1
Understand your audience
Understanding and knowing your audience is a process that can be hard to navigate but essential in designing human-centred, digital strategies that create valuable experiences and help drive change in your business – after all, humans are the ones who will be experiencing them.
You are most likely already aware of the challenges your own business faces. But by understanding your audiences better, through user research and design thinking, you can connect your business needs with your audiences’ needs – a duality that will help drive the creation of effective, valuable digital solutions.
Energy technology leader SLB worked with us to understand their complex audience ecosystem as part of delivering a new website for their rebrand project. The learnings from this process drove insight and innovation beyond the website – helping inform in intranet design projects, software development, and even joint ventures."
2
Simplify the complexity
Today, digital landscapes in businesses can be complex to understand and hard to navigate. User insight, and creative and strategic thinking can help simplify that complexity into concise, effective experiences that execute your brand in a digital space in a way that’s easy to understand.
Intelligent design and technology solutions can help your business stand out in a crowded market. But importantly, it’s not about adopting the latest trending technology or technique. It’s about defining the ‘why’, ‘where’ and ‘when’, not just the ‘what’. This frame of thinking ensures you’re speaking to your audience in the right context, in the right moment, and for the right reason. Increasing the chance of value creation for them, which ultimately helps drive value for your business.
For Kubrick, we delivered a simple yet effective website that engages their two target audiences – a business audience and a younger, post-graduate audience – without alienating either. This allowed them to reinforce their position in the market and saw a monthly increase of activity by over 300%.
3
Continually improve and innovate
Day one, the day your digital experience goes live, is not the end of the journey – it’s just the start.
Your audience needs are always changing, so you need to ensure your strategy and approach are equally continually working to improve and create value. Just like your products and services keep evolving based on commercial needs, so should your approach to digital experiences.
It’s vital businesses adopt a mindset of continuous improvement: Utilizing data and insights to understand how effective experiences are for users, and how they can be improved. This extends to every part of your digital ecosystem, internal or external. This approach of building continuous value through experiences is about implementing a culture of reflection, progress, and refinement – be that on your website, your digital product roadmap strategy, or your internal communications. Find out more here.
