Constantly Evolve Your Brand’s Digital Presence

With industries constantly evolving and customer expectations always shifting, change is not just welcomed, but required. This article by  Kenneth Lewis, CEO of ONEGOLD, touches on the top five ways businesses should handle this dynamic in order to thrive and not fall behind.

“Change culture” is required for companies of any size that should not only be welcomed but embraced. Market conditions and customer expectations shift rapidly, and your brand either adapts and flourishes or trails behind and goes out of business. Managing this dynamic requires a consistent “reinvention” of a brand’s website and app. Doing this right means using technology tools, streamlining the experience and understanding the customer so your brand presents an optimal experience for every visitor.

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Build Trust and Credibility

The cleanest design and streamlined UX are wasted if the customer lacks trust in your brand. Establish credibility by putting your best digital content, first. Use reviews on the front page to reinforce you’re a company with a solid history. Build content that allows customers to quickly compare your offering with others, and then enable them to quickly make decisions.

Review your site to ensure it relays in brief words and pictures who you are and why the customer should choose you. This trust is especially important for brands selling high-dollar value items, where the consumer performs comparison shopping and needs that trust in order to click “buy.” And this sense of “trust” is often subconscious. If your current site looks dark, cluttered, and outdated then it will seem out of place compared to more modern sites with clean designs. Visitors might feel if your site is not modern and functional, then perhaps your customer service is lacking, or your products are missing the innovations found with competitors.

Remove the Visible and Hidden Clutter

This simplification trend goes together with mobile-based experiences. Consumers expect instant answers, directions, recommendations, and completed transactions to occur within seconds. Brands that make all those expectations possible rely on the power of simplified messages and processes.

Look closely at your digital presence and spot the roadblocks. Roadblocks come in the form of excessive images or wordy copy, as well as the hidden areas that cause customers’ problems. We use HotJar to spot “rage clicks” which indicate our experience is not performing to the customer expectation. These issues are quickly handled, so the next customer sails through the roadblock. Perhaps your app process can shift from six taps to four. Or your team can remove some products from the home page and instead focus on the most profitable or the ones most easily understood. Using flyouts is a solid way to streamline the experience by having fewer items on a menu while giving users a choice to dive deeper. 

Make the digital journey purposeful and transparent. Customers should know where they’re headed and why. Streamlining your design is much more than adding white space and following an “Apple-esque” design aesthetic. It means making navigation easier and driving customers through your sales funnel in a more efficient yet organic way.

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Take the Analytics Approach

Analytics based on actual customer data are essential for making the most informed decisions, whether you’re in product development or finance. Site analytics provide your team with unbiased views into where people are getting stuck on your site and the ways you can tailor and improve the overall experience.

Utilize various technology tools to create a picture of the average consumer and their actions. For example, leverage a platform such as Hotjar to map out site visitor behaviors. Learn what people are clicking (and what they’re avoiding), length of stay, and other key metrics to uncover flaws in your design and to reinforce what’s working. Optimize content with Google Analytics to present different content versions for A/B testing or offer varying copy and imagery for multivariate testing. Or use heat mapping to reposition your content and process flow for higher conversion rates. There are multiple personalization tools on the market such as Dynamic Yield that provide brands with an additional layer of insight to build the best experiences. Brands are using these personalization technologies to present gamified popups, welcome messages, or geographic-based offers based on real-time user behaviors.

Create and Update a Clean App

App design requires a keenly customer-centric focus. Before updating or creating an app, ask a two-part question: What is the average user wanting to accomplish with the app, and how can they reach those goals with the least amount of actions? The app should continue an overall simplification of your digital content and ordering/action processes. If users conduct frequent repeat purchases via the app, then find ways to shorten the transaction time. Look at eliminating or combining steps. Does the app clearly explain (in just a few words) exactly what the customer is doing? If your customer base is a mix of experienced users and noobs, then cater the experience to each group’s needs so one doesn’t feel left out.

Once your app is launched, then it requires consistent updates to keep it fresh and adjusted based on customer feedback. The frequency of updates might depend on your budget, size of your team, and what you’re hearing from the customers. Focus on the UX with updates, as well as knocking out bugs, and making customer-requested or analytics-based adjustments.

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Meet the Needs of Multiple Demographics

This hits close to home as my organization, which is a marketplace to securely and conveniently buy, sell and redeem gold and other precious metals recently decided to better focus on two key demographics; high net-worth individuals and millennials. This initiative meant revamping the company’s site and building a new app.

Research data indicate high net-worth group dives deeper into the company’s products. They conduct research, want to understand pricing, and have many questions. While the millennial group desires simplicity, fast and easy answers, and smooth processes. Catering to both groups meant developing a site and app that is clean and easy-to-use, but also offer ways to go much deeper into the content, for example providing very comprehensive FAQs. Managing multiple audiences’ expectations and concerns is a common dilemma for digital marketers. A simple design is universally enjoyed by all demographics and is a good starting point for a digital presence that works for multiple groups.

Initial results indicate the rebrand and mobile app launch strategy is paying off. Since January 2020, new customer acquisitions jumped 4x month over month, and 5x year over year.

Evolving your digital content effectively requires an understanding of your customers as well as a keen eye for clean design and streamlining. The best digitally-focused brands adjust dynamically while keeping an eye on their perceived trust and credibility, shifting demographics, and customer’s ever-changing expectations.