Taking the first steps towards digital optimization

Introduction

The current situation has turned every aspect of our lives upside down, but it also represents an incredible opportunity for anything related to connected services and online business. It was already hard to get by without digital, but now it’s an essential way to reach prospects and customers.

Regardless of the methods you end up choosing, your end goal is to attract more people, get more subscribers, increase conversion rates, sell more. In short, you’re looking to improve your digital performance. However, between optimizing your information architecture, launching paid acquisition campaigns and updating the design of your digital platforms, you are probably asking yourself one important question.

Where to begin ?

Our goals at Adviso are to help you make good, data-driven decisions, give you the tools to make the most of your digital initiatives and create synergy and an ideal workflow between your team and your partners. In the interest of making that happen, here’s a reference sheet that will help you see things more clearly, align your teams around real customer problems and above all, direct your efforts to the places that will deliver the greatest results.

Reference sheet

In this first, essential step, you’ll gather together all the elements that will allow you to build the foundation of your digital strategy. After this, you’ll be able to approach any digital project with confidence.

Let's talk business

Before jumping into a project, it’s important to start by asking the right questions, starting with your organization:

What’s our business goal; what do we hope to achieve as an organization?
- Identify a measurable objective (in $, in sales volume, number of subscribers, conversion rate, etc.)
- List the actions, the sub-objectives that will allow us to achieve our business goal
- Align project teams around the organization’s goal and communicate the vision in a clear, concise manner
Who are our users? What are their needs?
- Clarify the key characteristics that make up our ideal user (e.g. demographic, main points of contact, desires/challenges, etc.)
- Look at our pool of users to evaluate the relevance of our offering and our impact on these users
- Identify the gap between users’ needs and the value proposition of the product offering
What are the assets (tools, platforms, channels) that make up our digital ecosystem?
- Evaluate the value of marketing tools and digital platforms in relation to our business goals
- Map out every digital point of contact a user might have with our brand (site, app, social media, blog, email, etc.)

Once you’ve answered these questions and established a solid foundation, you’ll be able to deploy more effective tactics, and optimize existing initiatives. And if ever crisis strikes or you feel like you’re getting away from your objectives, you can always circle back to your strategy and start fresh.

Let's talk platforms

Once you’ve established the guiding principles of your strategy, you’ll doubtless want to ensure that the initiatives you start with are ones that will have a significant impact on your performance. There’s a good chance that your website is the platform where your actions will have the greatest impact on your users:

Identify the page or pages most critical to the user experience
- Pages with the most traffic
- Pages where user actions take place
- Pages used as landing pages by your campaigns*Si ce n’est pas déjà le cas, nous vous recommandons fortement d’avoir une bonne structure de mesure avant de commencer un quelconque projet numérique – comment saurez-vous si un nouvel investissement vous a aidé?
Once you’ve identified your critical pages, map out the user journey starting from these pages
- How many pages/steps are there between the critical page and the user’s desired goal?
- What obstacles might your user encounter in this journey?
- Is there a clear, goal-aligned action for every page?*Our CX team prefers to use collaborative tools and methodologies (agency + client + users) like MIRO to visualize the journey and to identify opportunities and develop solutions as a team (link to Meryem’s article: https://www.adviso.ca/en/blog/guides-en/what-is-design-thinking/).
Optimize these best practices or integrate them into your user journey
- Get back to basics – a page, a main action, a measurable goal
- Watch out for corporate jargon, instead choose the language and terms used by your users
- A diagram or product image at the top of the page can help the user contextualize their browsing
- Offer users a suggested journey, clearly presenting the steps to complete and demonstrating the value proposition of each action

With better visualization of the steps to be taken and a good understanding of your organization, you hold in your hands the key elements of digital performance optimization. The next step is to plan a realistic deployment of your initiatives while regularly measuring the performance of the changes you’re making.

Roadmap

A powerful tool for your arsenal:
A digital strategy roadmap, combined with a strong situational analysis and relevant performance goals. This will give you a clear understanding of where you are today, where you want to be tomorrow and how you will get there. As a web specialist, Adviso demonstrates the effectiveness of this business-based approach with every new digital performance project we take on.

The development and operationalization of a digital roadmap is one of the proven techniques we employ to help our clients set realistic goals and improve their performance.