How (where) to fix the link between digital engagement and business value
Making the assumption that engagement equals business value is a huge leap of faith. It removes causality from our understanding of how our marketing works and reduces our ability to improve. How do we fix it?
From my experience, these are the three areas where I would look for improvements to strengthen the connection between engagement and business value. And it’s not what you expect:
1. Weak or vague strategy
The execution is only going to be as good as what the strategy enables. I used to be a designer before I became a strategist. I’ve worked at both ends. Weak strategy leads to weak execution.
With a vague strategy execution teams are like ships at sea without rudder or sail. If the strategy from the brand teams are high altitude, non-specific or do not translate well to execution we get a strategy-to-execution gap.
To solve this make sure the strategy teams not only see strategy as a deliverable to the leadership, but also as a design brief giving guidance, details and direction to the teams needing to know ‘what’ and ‘why’ to design good experiences.
As the author of the strategy always ask: If I was to design something based on this, how clear or ambiguous is the guidance?
2. The wrong marketing mindset (go-to-market model)
There are many different types of marketing models depending on the industry, customer, context etc. If we choose the wrong model the path we set for the customer to travel from where they are today to the behavioral change is unfit for the customer and the situation they are in.
I’ve seen too many marketers use FMCG / retail based models designed to sell muffins and make-up of a super market shelf when the real job is to help e.g. a physician stay up-to-date and improve their standard of care.
Using the wrong model only solves marketing problems that don’t exist. Luckily making the right model is not very hard. Most marketers already know it, but nobody is asking the right questions.
Ask: What is the goal, who is involved, what do they have to do and what influences them? How can we make a model to accurately represent this?
3. Wrong feedback
Our platforms and websites aren’t designed to give the right feedback. We use the wrong signals from the interactions to make assumptions about progress. We need to design experiences to learn the right things and capture the right data to see if what we are doing works and make improvements.
Ask: What and where are we trying to have influence on the customer in the go-to-market model? What decisions do we need to make? What do we need to learn to make better decisions (NB! different stakeholders make different types of decisions)?
