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Content is Core to Digital Strategy

Photos of books made by PediaPress with Wikipe...
Photos of books made by PediaPress with Wikipedia content. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Content is vital in the execution of any digital strategy — it’s how potential customers learn about what you do and come to trust that you can do what you say. Trust is the key to conversions and referrals.  Good content, that builds trust and reputation, requires a systematic and strategic approach so that you can make sure that you’re creating value for your audience. Duct Tape Marketing has a great article on how to go about creating content to meet your digital strategies:

Today, the common thread in almost every element of delivering on strategy is content. Content is how you move people from know to like to trust. Content is how you give your marketing strategy a voice and, because of that, you must take a strategic and systematic approach to how your content is developed. — How to Make Content the Voice of Strategy by John Jontsch

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Data-Driven Customer Experience as a Competitive Advantage

ETMS
ETMS (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Companies are always looking for competitive advantages — what can make them stand out against their competitors.  Using data and analytics to drive customer experience improvements can be a long-haul competitive advantage — increasing conversions and repeat business. While some data analysis can be complex, there are a number of metrics that a business can look at to see basics like where website traffic is coming from and where people get stuck during the conversion/sales process.  Econsultancy has a great roundup of why data-driven customer experience is important and what to look for:

Great customer experience is one of the hardest things for your competitors to copy.

A strategy of continuous improvement can offer clear differentiation from competitors.

However, it’s only when we measure what customers are actually seeing and doing when they are interacting with our digital channels, that we can understand where they might have issues or unmet needs.

Rather than theorise about potential problems or rely on closely monitoring small samples of test users, we need to let the data lead us to areas of concern. — Data-driven customer experience is tough to copy by Geoff Galat

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Getting Your Ads More than Seen

Advertising
Advertising (Photo credit: Wrote)

There’s a great  post over at MarketingProfs that dissects an eye-tracking study to show where on a web page ads are most likely to be seen:

Advertisers looking to boost the effectiveness of their digital display ads should be focusing on in-content units, nontraditional placements, contextually relevant creative, and above-the-fold locations, according to recent data from Infolinks. — Eye-Tracking Study: How to Beat Display Ad Blindness by Ayaz Nanji

Having your ad get seen is just half the battle — the next problem is to get someone to actually take action (click, mouseover, etc.).  While there certainly is some value in getting an ad seen (if they look at it long enough to read and understand), most advertisers want people to take action and click the ads. MarketingProfs analysis of the study didn’t include any click data.  The assumption is that people will be more likely to click in places they are more likely to look. Is this true?

Will these types of results lead to even more advertising that is difficult to distinguish from content? How will that impact how people interact with advertising?

Another question I have is whether there is any impact with having so many ads on the page.  If you only have one ad on the left (a typical ad place), but it doesn’t look like a typical ad, will people be more likely to look?  It seems like a page that’s full of advertising is going to saturate what a visitor will look at.

One of the key findings from the study is that people completely block out areas of the page that they believe have ads (especially if there are ad-looking things there).  This should be an important consideration for the design of sites without ads — make sure people don’t think you have ads in  ad-places if you want them to look there.

 

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