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More and more, marketers are seeking full digital experience platforms to streamline the marketing process and relieve pressure for the whole team. Rather than separating marketing, customer care, research, engagement, and advertising, full digital experience platforms bring everything under one roof. Even if you operate across various messaging channels and numerous social media platforms, a full digital experience provides the tools to succeed.
However, we have an age-old problem when choosing between the different platforms - difficulty in knowing which is the best for your business or your marketing team. In this guide, we’ve compiled some of the most prominent needs for marketers in this area. This is what marketers are looking for in platforms they use for full digital experience.
First and foremost, the days of putting up with a cluttered, ugly dashboard are over. These days, tools need a clean interface and simple dashboard to succeed. Marketers have enough on their plates without having to deal with confusing interfaces and problematic navigation.
With a simple interface, it’s possible to adjust campaigns and analyze the numbers at the click of a button. As we all know, quick reactions allow businesses to stay ahead of the pack. When a tool isn’t inviting, using the platform becomes a chore and competing with others becomes even more challenging (to say the least!).
For the best efficiency, the platform should have a central dashboard where all pertinent information is accessible instantly.
In all likelihood, marketers need a tool like this because they have a team of specialists working on the digital experience. Therefore, it needs to accommodate teams with communication and collaboration features. With in-platform chat, two members of a team can discuss insights and other aspects of the strategy without having to click away and communicate elsewhere. Compared to platforms without in-platform chat, these tools save money and save time. Have a simple question to ask a colleague? Just open up the chat and get a response in seconds.
Elsewhere, marketers also appreciate collaboration tools such as sharing. After generating a report, they shouldn’t have to export it and send it through email (which some stakeholders won’t see or open!). Instead, share the reports on the platform and make them accessible to all stakeholders instantly. With features like this, communication silos are avoided (finally).
Recently, dashboard sharing has risen to the list of important features for marketers. Within seconds, team members can share real-time reports and everybody instantly receives the latest information.
Many marketers have had bad experiences with services that didn’t allow any flexibility where you ended up paying for all sorts of unwanted features just to get the one that you do need. For us, this is no good in the modern market. Instead, digital solutions need to offer flexibility and scalability. For this reason, marketers are choosing companies that allow them to sculpt the service to exactly their needs. Rather than having to invest in everything, they want to pick and choose the services they receive.
These days, leading companies allow customers to choose a package tailored to their own needs. This is important, and it must be adjustable in the long-term. As the business grows and the marketer’s needs expand, they want to be able to add to the package freely. For example, they might start with advertising services. After a few months, they may want to add research and customer support services. If a company doesn’t offer this flexibility, marketers will go elsewhere because their needs are constantly evolving.
Nowadays, full digital experience services also need to offer more than just the initial services. Companies working with a platform of this type enjoy the help, but they want something else from the relationship too - to learn. The very best full digital experiences offer training and education systems. In addition to helping marketers get the most value from the platform itself, we think education should also cover other industry topics and help clients to develop greater awareness of platform best practices.
For us, there’s an important distinction between selfless and selfish services in this area. While selfish services want all clients to rely on them, selfless services have a goal to help all marketers become better in their role, and this includes education and training. Some full digital experiences include:
Media buying has become an important part of marketing, and full digital experience services need to include this in their offering. With clever algorithms and predictive systems, it should rank campaigns, creatives, and audiences to help the marketers make more informed decisions at all times. With these insights, marketers draw conclusions based on the data rather than on guesswork.
It seems as though algorithms are improving continually which is why savvy marketers rely on them to find growth opportunities. Marketers, therefore, need AI to step up and provide recommendations for the most important channels in their strategies. From here, it should be as simple as clicking one button to implement suggestions.
With opportunities to improve, advanced AI predictions, and real-time campaign adjustment, marketers have everything they need to utilize their budgets effectively. Naturally, these tools should also automate wherever possible.
We just mentioned it, and it bears repeating because no marketer wants to waste their time on simple, boring, mundane tasks. These days, it’s no longer acceptable to fill a to-do list with tasks that technology can complete for you. Why waste an hour doing something that AI and machine learning can do in ten seconds?
With this in mind, all marketers now look for automation in all online tools, and this includes those catered to the full digital experience. Tools of this nature generally cover a few different areas – ad optimization, customer care, competitor research - and businesses save hundreds of working hours each month by automating these simple jobs.
How are implemented changes affecting the overall strategy? When executing new ideas, you need to know that the change has had a positive effect, so this is the next requirement from marketers. Remember, marketers are under intense scrutiny so they can’t afford to make rash decisions.
With growth management and monitoring, marketers check the performance of all spending and ensure that the business is moving in the right direction. Ideally, the tool will have a calendar to keep track of all product launches and other events. Opportunities and bottlenecks can then be highlighted in real time while keeping valuable KPIs in mind.
We mentioned flexibility in marketing, and this extends to custom KPIs. Sometimes, marketers want to create their own custom KPIs to bring together all data from ad accounts. To understand the efficacy of campaigns, dashboards should also be customizable.
We keep using the phrase ‘full digital experience’, and more marketers are now focusing on the ‘full’ part of the equation. It’s not enough to just offer help with advertising because marketers also need assistance with content marketing, research, engagement, and customer care. The very best services in the niche will not only offer flexibility and scalability, but they will have services covering the whole digital experience. Marketers want to generate sales, boost exposure, encourage engagement, reduce the cost of content production, increase conversion rates, and protect the reputation of the brand online.
Other services include success management, analysis and strategy, moderation services, enablement, and transformational services.
In addition to everything we’ve listed so far, marketers also need knowledge and experience from their chosen full digital experience tool. We would never want to detract from the effort of new services, but most marketers want a tool that has a proven positive reputation after many years in the industry. Therefore, when comparing services, they will read the story of the brand while also looking for a list of big-name customers. If a brand has worked with the likes of Samsung, Apple, or Honda, they can be sure of a positive experience.
How do they check for knowledge? Well, normally this comes through a demonstration or tutorial. For us, this is another core element of a platform because marketers want to delve into how everything works before they spend any money. With a demonstration, they not only learn how the platform looks and acts, but they also learn whether it will work for them, they get to meet a representative from the company itself, and they get a feeling for the brand as a whole.
When looking for platforms that offer full digital experience services, marketers consider several factors. This includes a clean interface and dashboard, collaboration and communication tools, flexibility and scalability, training, media buyer monitoring, automation, growth manager monitoring, a variety of different services, and knowledge and experience.
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