How to Start a Digital Customer Strategy for Websites

Long long time ago – well 5 or 10 years ago – companies tried to make a difference based on the products they made for their customers. The old fashion value chain model was great. It would give us the ability to find ways to cut the costs of producing a product.

But now you can go online and check the prices for a product within seconds. And if you have a physical shop or even a web shop I will bet that somewhere on the web there is a shop who will sell your product cheaper than you.

There are a lot of websites where you are checking prices and you can find the cheapest one in 5 seconds right? Maybe you are setting up the prices based on your costs. But what if a web shop is setting their prices based on the lifetime value of a customer. In this case they can push their sales prices back maybe 5 or 10 percent.

So you might find that you can go to your local store and get an item for 25 dollars and you can go online see buy the precise same product for 10 dollars. So why should you get 15 dollars more in the local shop. Well this is all old news – I know.

So how do you make a different? How do you show the customer that they will have to buy the product in your shop? What kind of value are you giving to your customers? Companies these days need to find new ways to make a different.

 

Connecting devices

The shift from producing and selling your products locally to the role of delivering the best value for the customer is driving – among other things – by the connecting devices.

The computer power of a Smartphone these days are bigger than the computer power used by NASA to put a man on the moon.

So as a company we will have to use these new devices to boost our business.

And it’s not just the mobile phones. It’s also tablet computers and notebooks. The devices are all making it easier for the customers to find products and services online. To compare the products. We don’t go online once a week to check out a shop or products, we are always online. We are getting hints from our friends. We check the reviews.

And this amazing new approach really opens up a brand new world for us marketing people right? We will have to create the right Digital Strategy – to show our customers that they have to put the product on our website. Even though we might not be the cheapest one, we could bring the highest value.

So instead of having your focus on the costs of producing a product, we should now have the focus on delivering the best value to the customers. We need to pay attention to people using multiple social networks, multiple devices, always online.

We need to develop a “Digital Customer Strategy”

 

4 step Digital Customer Strategy

So let me show you this 4 step guide for starting this digital customer strategy.

 

1) Mission and value of your company and brand

You need to be in compliance with your mission and value. You can’t have a luxury brand offline and a cheap product online right?

A digital online customer should have the same feel of the company online and offline. And the value should be showed in every marketing channel.

2) The Intended digital experience

Describe how you want to interact with your customers need. Don’t talk about IT or HTML.

In plain text write down, how you want to help the customer gathering information about the same kind of product as yours?

What kind of information should be provided to the customer before buying your product? What about after sale information?

How do you want to engage your customers? Remember your customers are online 24/7.

 

3) Activities and processes that support the intended digital experience

Now you will have to talk about IT and HTML. How can you deliver the intended digital experience and give your customers more value?

Do you your customer to get a white paper about the topic or product? Do you want the customer to be able to compare products? Do you want the customer to get links to product reviews? Do you have an email club? What about the social media?

How do you want to keep touch with your customer 24/7?

 

4) Digital channel investments

Now you know your mission and brand value, you know what kind of digital experience you want to give your customers to give them extra value right?

And you also know which activities and processes you need to support the digital experience. So now you have to invest in your activities and processes.

With your clear strategy in place, your company can now make the decisions about the website, so they will have the most impact on their businesses instead of just following a me-too strategy.

 

Free eBooks…
Remember to grab the 3 free eBooks here at SeoCustomer all about SEO, SEM, Social Media Traffic and Link Building.

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Have a great day out there.

Henrik