Does your marketing need a spinal readjustment?

In the digital economy, a corporation’s .com platform needs to be relevant and enable consistency across digital touchpoints. Today’s users are demanding an intuitive and easily digestible format of information to meet their (business) needs and goals at each stage of their digital dialogue journey with a brand. Digital businesses such as Amazon, as well as other rising cloud-based products such as Airbnb, have built the foundations of their operations on an exceptional digital architecture and there is a subsequent expectation that other .com sites are equally intelligent and value adding for the user.

The .com should act as the spine of a brand’s digital ecosystem and serve as the backbone for all other digital properties, channels and experiences. The problem is that this spine is often a static IT driven platform driven by technology rather than users’ needs. Corporate sites can no longer be an unstructured dump of brand-centric information, achievements and products, but brands should instead focus on creating intelligent and relevant platforms that become smarter through interaction with users, analyzing their behavior and understanding how to effectively and accurately match content with their needs across all digital touch points.

Assessment of corporate sites 

Vertic recently conducted a study of corporate sites to identify the top trends and provide recommendations on how brands can move away from traditional practices. The different sites were evaluated on the basis of the overall experience using the following parameters:

• Design / UX / UI
• Copywriting
• Information architecture
• Taxonomy
• Cross-channel integration
• User need centricity
• The technology used to optimize user experience.

Based on current trends there were clear similarities between sites offering a more value adding user experience. Value adding user corporate websites provide optimized, seamless and predictive user experiences. Their UX is simplistic, with large images and typography as design, large readable font, and engaging humanistic language. They are intuitive, with a focus on presenting one thing at a time, while stylized and large typography is used as a means to break up text-heavy pages and content. White spacing and clean backgrounds are used to create a simple, clean, digestible experience, and they mostly feature content on long pages with a ‘sticky menu’ to accommodate user experiences on smaller or mobile devices. Comparatively, sites that were found to be more dated have a dry and corporate tone of voice, small tinted and faded imagery, small fonts, and too much cluttered content. These sites commonly have a templated design, traditional navigation and grid layout home page.  

Outside-in versus inside-out

Websites were also distinguishable by brands that adopt a more outside-in versus inside-out perspective and language. Inside-out websites often focus on the company’s achievements and products, for example by highlighting their CSR initiatives in a self-serving manner. The language used addresses all stakeholders at the same time without resonating with an individual. On the other hand, leading corporate websites are exploring the world outside the company itself, and they tell stories about the industry while covertly touching on the brand’s values. These companies are all about the brand experience, are driven by insights and offer thought leadership. They do not only create unique content but also curate content from relevant third party sources, bringing voices from the outside world as an integral part of their communication. Outward focused sites offer enhanced search functionality with predictive and corrective search, as well as highly personalized content used from the data captured from the user. 

Personalization 

Personalization is one of the most important capabilities in today's marketing landscape. However, personalization alone does not drive value or relevancy, it is simply more likely to grasp the attention of the user seeing as there will be aspects of the content for which they have a cognitive prior appreciation for. Brands must therefore match personalization efforts with engaging and tailored content to ensure they retain the attention of the user. At Vertic we have developed our own proprietary tool, Digital IQ, that supports decision making about semantic, search behavior and other digital trends. The tool offers insights into what users search for, their sentiment about various relevant topics, and what they are saying about those topics. Digital IQ examines search engine traffic as well as chatter in online forums and social channels. It also encompasses the social conversation around the specific brands activities, and provides actionable content ideas that we would not otherwise be able to generate and guarantee to be of interest.  We are combining these insights with small data about the audience.

When analyzing the trends, it became apparent that they can be distilled into 3 main buckets which have unsurprisingly been defined and demonstrated by 3 of the most accredited and well-known brands: Apple, Google and Amazon. In terms of design and language, Apple’s use of large, clean pictures, and simplistic and friendly language should provide direction for dated corporate sites. Secondly, for the trend on more predictive and enhanced search, we gather insights from the pioneer in search optimization, Google.  Google has a focus on user intent – a user’s search results are boxed according to relevancy and result inter-dependencies. Google’s algorithm is constantly getting smarter with data and signals gathered from users, it is increasingly able to understand the user’s intent rather than their explicit search query. Brands should invest in embedding a more intelligent search engine into their website to improve user interaction. Lastly, sites in the past often adopted a more linear method of serving content; however, brands such as Amazon have contributed to the characterization of the final trend of a more circular site map. Corporate sites should constantly be serving users with new and relevant content related to their initial search query, and this should be both branded and curated content that will enable them to think beyond their initial need and gather a comprehensive amount of information to share with their team.

Consistency

As users increasingly demand similar experiences, brands should endeavor to replicate the information architecture, design, and search functionality of these leaders in the digital marketing landscape. Brands should be able to create a frictionless experience, one that is simple, personalized, and that enables users to easily discover offerings. It all lies in marketing's ability to effectively translate the vision of the customer to their team, organization and the markets. Users should quickly be able to locate their area of interest and understand how to navigate to relevant information. Personalization efforts should be prioritized to ensure a truly resonating experience. If companies treat their .com as the spine on which all other digital platforms connect to in a personalized and relevant way, they will create a superior brand experience that will increase digital conversions regardless of the stakeholder or business objective.