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Exciting Times - Digital expert comments on digital change

Digital never stops evolving – at pace. Connected devices are continually driving new consumer behaviour. While exciting, this rate of change has the ability to catapult businesses into unchartered territory and sometimes chaos. But of course, with digital so fundamental to the success of a business, when digital techniques are applied in the right way they can be game-changers.

Tony Foggett, CEO of digital agency Code Computerlove, looks at five key developments in digital that will have significant impact on businesses this year.

1. Experience platforms.

Some major advances are happening with regards to customer experience management – driven by the continued diversification of devices and the hyper connected consumer. Disjointed/fragmented marketing tools are being superceded by the trend for platform agnostic hubs that enable more personalised content, content written once applied everywhere and a much more interactive consumer experience – delivering levels of sophistication and intuition now expected by the end user.

To this end we’re witnessing heightened demand from businesses to re-engineer their platform and digital infrastructure and bring customer experience management under a single point of control across the whole business. In 2015 this will go beyond CMS.

By investing in an enterprise marketing platform, that manages all digital properties under one umbrella, businesses have something that they can build on for continual improvement. This means evolution not revolution as standard. It future-proofs the business for future consumer behaviours, new devices and trends.

Having already delivered a number of Sitecore platforms, we’re particularly excited about this year’s major Sitecore 8 upgrade, which will be a key advancement within this arena and will open up a raft of new possibilities to clients.

But let’s not have all the gear and no idea! A cautionary note here for brands embracing this trend, it’s still about what you do with a more sophisticated experience platform. The CMSs will allow brands to deliver more personalised and contextual information, but marketers still need to work with partners who can deliver creativity, strategy and insight.

2. Evolution Not Transformation

Business Transformation through digital was undoubtedly one of the buzz words of 2014 but the industry is starting to see anti-transformational messages. The answer isn’t digital transformation, which is painful, costly and forced change (and confirmation that the brand has previously ‘got it wrong’ having possibly already spent thousands of pounds.) Evolution will supercede transformation and brands and businesses will be enlightened to work with partners who will help them continually evolve, not just deliver ‘quick fixes’. Moreover, brands who’ve invested in the right platform won’t need to re-platform again but can successfully evolve using their technologies.

We will see a significant shift in an agency’s role to not only deliver strategy, ideas and solutions, but to support internal digital teams’ capabilities to ensure continued adoption, adaptation and growth. This is already something Code has embraced through our talent division, where we train internal teams in areas where it makes sense for them to be self sufficient, allowing for a next phase of growth and evolution, where we lead and focus on the ‘added value’ and innovation on top of what internal teams can do.

3. The Content Battle

Content is progressively more vital in digital ‘performance’. It’s the right content delivered via the best technology or system possible that delivers a rich brand experience, and a more meaningful and rewarding relationship – brands taking this approach will undoubtedly pull further ahead in 2015’s battle for consumer’s attention and loyalty.

In my opinion, content requires a classic digital approach. Digital strategists to ensure a content strategy is based on strong insight into the target audiences and their digital needs; copywriters experienced in writing across digital platforms; SEO specialists who understand the way in which content can impact on search; digital creatives; production capability to ensure the content is presented in the best way possible from mobiles to desktop; and it needs UX and persuasion specialists to create content that’s not just ‘fluff’ but drives a consumer response to buy, share, or recommend. This combination ensures content is effective when online.

Delivering content derived from digital insight and using platforms with the capability to evolve and grow with their audiences over time will achieve the most impact for brands in 2015 and is where I feel digital agencies will make significant triumphs in the battle of who should deliver content strategies for clients.

4. The Penny Will Finally Drop (On What Mobile First Really Means)

Year on year, significant changes in device screen sizes and capabilities, as well as cross device usage, have heavily blurred the boundaries between traditional classifications of desktop, tablet and mobile. But it’s shocking that even with the rise of responsive design, the the standard approach to mobile design and development is still to design the “full size” desktop site and degrade down to tablet and mobile.

Mobile First has emerged as an approach that addresses these changes (when applied correctly), but it does represent a fundamental shift in the web design and development process. Hence why so many still aren’t really getting it. Also, Mobile First is often misinterpreted and considered as prioritising mobile design above desktop. This is also incorrect.

Mobile First is a progressive design approach, which begins with understanding real content priorities for users and designing an experience to present prioritised content on a small screen device first, then building on and enhancing that experience to work on more devices with greater capabilities (such as larger screen size, touch, geo-location). This is polar opposite in approach to the traditional desktop down approach that would remove/break functionality and force-fit content into smaller screens on lesser capable devices.

The approach is designed to be device agnostic, with a focus on a single, seamless experience for end users, designing for their content needs and a business’ priorities. This removes the need to accommodate an uncontrollable number of user devices.

Techniques such as adaptive design and graceful degradation are redundant as all devices and situations are covered through progressive enhancement.

Using a Mobile First approach in 2015 means all current and future devices are covered, including any combination of screen size and technology set, as allowing the delivery of seamless cross-device user experiences. It delivers content that is meaningful to every user, on every device at every moment. 2015 will be the year that the industry wakes up to this and we see more production teams adopting best practice.

5. Wearables

We will undoubtedly see a surge of creativity on these platforms as brands look to get ahead and deliver innovative solutions to attract, acquire, engage, and retain consumers via these new and exciting devices. It won’t stop at mainstream wearable devices, that include Smartwatches, glasses, clothes, wristbands, rings and virtual reality headsets, it will be smart devices in general that we will see more of, particularly things in the home.

I expect brands within the health, sporting and home sectors to continue to be some of the front-runners on these platforms along with retail brands who will embrace the opportunities for mobile payment, personalised location based messaging and in-store communications and navigation. Devices are also likely to be used by customer facing staff to enhance customer service and the merging of physical and digital retail environments.

Success stories of brands embracing this trend will be from those that innovate over the customer journey and form connections between services, devices and places with seamless experiences; and from brands who’ve made sure that wearable devices are right for the content they’re serving – not those developing for these devices for the sake of it without a clear content strategy behind it.

Tony Foggett is CEO of digital agency Code Computelrove

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Kirsty Hunt .