Not much in business can survive without a strategy. Often the foundation for any good strategy and its proper execution are the right tools. Your digital communications strategy is no different. It requires an agile platform that allows you to respond to the changing needs of your business. When deciding on the software to help you execute your strategies, flexibility is an asset you’ll want to seek. With the right system, you can tackle three important elements of a digital communications strategy: knowing your audience, brand consistency, and interaction of channels.
Know Your Audience
Whether digital communications are used for internal use or customer engagement, one key aspect businesses must keep at the forefront of their content philosophy: know the intended audience. For clients, it’s a matter of understanding the typical buyer persona. Buyer personas are fictional representations of the ideal customer, considering things like demographics, preferences, challenges, and pain points. Use these factors as a guide for the strategy behind display content and distribution. Internally, workforce-specific dynamics should be taken into account. You can obtain this information from surveys or other data points to build content strategies based on employee- and work-related needs.
Assisting you with how you use digital communications to engage your audience should be a feature-rich software system that allows you to share information to any screen in just a few simple steps. This keeps your organization agile and provides the ability to quickly respond to changes or new trends.
Be Consistent with Your Message and Brand
If your digital communications aren’t consistent with your brand, your sending mixed messages. Effective digital communications strategies stick to their story. Staying on-brand and on-message enables both awareness and growth in loyalty. Model content around what it is that makes the brand singular, including core messaging such as value proposition.
Consistency is easier when you use a solution that includes design functionality. Create content in a system that already has your branding assets like colors and font, so even the simplest designs are on brand.
Communication Channels Should Interact
Multiple touchpoints, that include digital communications, are proven to be a sales driver. Per an Accenture study, customers that engage with brands through numerous channels have three times the sales volume. Improve strategies by looking at multiple channels and find opportunities for interaction.
For example, it’s become quite common to integrate social media with digital displays, for external and internal audiences. These platforms have the power to influence their members and tying social media content into displays can make an impact. When brands are being discussed—positively or negatively—via social media interaction, customers consider this as a review, one they trust and heed. In fact, according to the PwC total retail survey 2016, 45% of consumers said reading reviews, comments, and feedback influences their shopping behavior. Additionally, when users like and comment on a brand’s feed, the FOMO (fear of missing out) impulse is often activated, which can drive even more sales.
Internally, sharing content from the company’s Intranet or social media can promote employee engagement. Employees often feel uninformed, and seek transparency, as determined in Kimble Applications study, which found that 46% of employees weren’t confident in their employer’s communication regarding the health of the company. This disconnection could improve with a multi-touch digital communications campaign.
To enable this cross-channel strategy, you’ll need a platform that makes this easy. Look for a program that allows for integrations with a variety of data and information sources.
