Staying Ahead of the Content Creation Wave

SWIPE! That’s it—your cus­tomer has moved on to a com­peti­tor in a heart­beat. That’s about how long it takes to lose today’s dig­i­tal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed cus­tomer if your con­tent isn’t engag­ing, doesn’t cre­ate a per­son­al, rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence, or takes too long to load. You have about 7 sec­onds to make your first impres­sion and begin a jour­ney with a new customer.

Are your dig­i­tal assets up to these new stan­dards that are sweep­ing the Internet?

The time is right for the Nordic region to get our dig­i­tal act togeth­er. Accord­ing to INSEAD (INSti­tut Européen d’ADministration des affaires – Euro­pean Insti­tute of Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion) in its annu­al Glob­al Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy Report (GITR), Fin­land, Swe­den and Nor­way con­sis­tent­ly rank with­in the top five of the world’s most “tech-ready” coun­tries, beat­ing out Japan and the Unit­ed States.

Busi­ness­es are strug­gling with many chal­lenges as they try to adapt their organ­i­sa­tions to an Inter­net that has been pret­ty much com­plete­ly trans­formed by the pro­lif­er­a­tion of mobile devices, mobile apps, and con­sumers’ ever-increas­ing desire for high­ly per­son­alised expe­ri­ences. The list of trans­for­ma­tions you need to make is growing:

  1. Deliv­er seam­less expe­ri­ences across mul­ti­ple devices in the same household.
  2. Cap­ture rel­e­vant data on cus­tomer inter­ac­tion with the brand’s dig­i­tal assets.
  3. Cre­ate a cohe­sive, dig­i­tal foun­da­tion for all chan­nels on all platforms.
  4. Have con­sis­tent, opti­mised dig­i­tal assets across all chan­nels and touch points.
  5. Elim­i­nate offer­ing irrel­e­vant ser­vices that are not relat­ed to the customer’s imme­di­ate needs.
  6. Con­sis­tent­ly eval­u­ate the effec­tive­ness of campaigns.
  7. Break down inter­nal organ­i­sa­tion­al silos and get every­one in the organ­i­sa­tion on the same page.

Most organ­i­sa­tions are strug­gling with the costs of this dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. You can keep your costs under con­trol with some of these best practices:

Map out your cus­tomer jour­ney and under­stand your cus­tomers’ needs and expe­ri­ence at every touch point on every chan­nel. Your trans­for­ma­tion is not all about the tech­nol­o­gy. Iden­ti­fy the silos in your orga­ni­za­tion and doc­u­ment how they might be an obsta­cle to cre­at­ing a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Get every depart­ment togeth­er and lit­er­al­ly make a map, draw­ing out every pos­si­ble way a cus­tomer can inter­act with your organ­i­sa­tion. Get every depart­ment to see that they are all in the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence busi­ness and every action should be direct­ed at meet­ing the cus­tomers’ needs.

Make all your dig­i­tal assets con­sis­tent across all chan­nels and touch points. You don’t need unique con­tent on every chan­nel. In fact, your cus­tomers want to see con­sis­tent mes­sages and con­tent on all their devices at every touch point. Make sure your con­tent is serv­ing the cus­tomers’ needs, not just the needs of a par­tic­u­lar department’s inter­nal procedures.

Seek inte­grat­ed ana­lyt­i­cal tools to under­stand cus­tomer inter­ac­tions on every chan­nel. While on the sur­face this may seem the more expen­sive option, when you add up all the time you spend bring­ing togeth­er the out­put of dif­fer­ent ven­dors and plat­forms to merge with your plat­form, it starts to look more eco­nom­i­cal very quickly.

Accept that expe­ri­ence is your brand today, and your cus­tomers and prospects will judge your brand, not on the basis of what ser­vice or prod­uct you pro­vide, but by the qual­i­ty of their online experience.

Use user-gen­er­at­ed social media con­tent. Not only is this rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive to feed into your dig­i­tal assets, but it is what cus­tomers want. Use image feeds from con­tent cura­tor ser­vices, rel­e­vant posts from your brand’s social net­work pages, dis­cus­sion boards, blogs, and rat­ing and review sites.

Feed­back insights gained from the data to improve your ser­vice and con­stant­ly test to find the sweet spot.

The way the aver­age Nordic con­sumer engages with com­pa­nies and prod­ucts has become increas­ing­ly dig­i­tal, cre­at­ing a headache for those busi­ness­es that are not tra­di­tion­al­ly cus­tomer-focused or have yet to embrace an effec­tive dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. But the longer you wait, the fur­ther away from you your cus­tomer will be and the hard­er it will be to win them back.