Figaro Digital asked Amaze to contribute their predictions fo r2010. What follows are some of the emergingtrends that Amaze believe marketers and organisations need to consider for this year.
2009 proved to be a challenging year; the economic downturn has further promoted digital to the forefront, changes in media consumption, continual advancements in technology and the meteoric rise of Social Media and techniques have all added to the mix. 2010 will prove to be as challenging and hopefully exciting.
Digital Beats at the Heart of Every Organisation
We are working with many of our clients to look beyond digital as a communications tool and begin to treat digital as an integral part of their business (as well as marketing) infrastructure. This is a trend we predict will accelerate in 2010, and be enhanced by the shift from awareness and acquisition drives, to customer loyalty and retention.
So what does this mean? Marketers need to work with their agencies and within their organisations to develop an in-depth understanding of the digital landscape and put in place a digital business strategy that delivers a superior customer engagement across all digital touch points. A digital business strategy is wider than a digital communications strategy, it goes beyond marketing and communications and makes digital an integral part of the organisation.
Digital CPR:
- Focus on delivering a superior online customer experience and translating the brand, in its totality, into digital form and function
- Ensure that consumers can achieve their goals across all digital channels
- Consider the web to be a fundamental part of the organisation’s business infrastructure
- E-enable customer services and operational processes making them central to the organisation’s digital strategy
- Use digital channels to optimise business efficiencies and effectiveness
- Embrace the virtual and integrate it into your real world principals and functions
This doesn’t mean that digital communications is no longer important - it is - but it needs to be part of a wider digital business strategy to truly deliver a superior customer experience and increase customer loyalty. We predict that in 2010 we will see an increase in the e-enabling of services and a rapid growth in real-time customer interaction. For example, proactive customer engagement using live chat will begin to gain real traction, with forward looking, customer centric organisations integrating call centres and customer service desks into their digital infrastructure.
Digital isn’t ‘coming’. It’s here, and it’s part of everything, or at least it will be.
Mobile comes of Age – At Last
You’ll have heard this one before… many times: this is the year of the mobile. Well, finally, it’s true. 2010 really will be the year of the mobile despite previous false starts. We will see both mobile browsing and mobile apps start to emerge as a powerful force amongst consumers. Previously, although the possibilities were there, the appetite wasn’t; screens were too small, connections speeds to slow, graphics to basic. All that has changed.
Mobile browsing and mobile applications are different: they are truly personal and are able to provide much more of a footprint in the user’s life than a standard web browser – they’re always in your pocket (or within arm’s reach). They are instant, always on, personal and increasingly cheap – as a result, they are extremely powerful.
Over the last 18 months we have seen 150% growth in mobile browser web traffic, with the Apple iPhone being the most used mobile browser. Globally, there are 1.5 billion internet users; however, the wireless subscriber base in 2008 was over 2 billion and they’re not just sending texts.
Think smart
This uplift amongst the mobile browser community will have a consequential impact on the design of web sites. Mobile users browse in a different way, they are looking for different types of information: they are either on the move and want short, snappy instant information or are using their latest Smart phone device in their leisure time to browse the web. A new mindset will develop which will see the mobile as a far more important web access point. A laptop can often get in the way of fast information retrieval from the internet or simply be associated with work rather than leisure.
The mobile app adds another dimension to this world. A small application bundle of rich media content and functionality with access to the user’s most personal of personal devices; it knows their whereabouts, their personal profile and has been chosen to be installed by the user for quick and easy access to a valuable service or simply to entertain them on demand. Take Apple iPhone users: 93% of them have visited the App Store, 40 million devices have been sold, 33% of users are using at least one downloaded app over ten times per month. The times they are a-changing.
They key to comms in the near future is getting into the mind of the mobile user. What makes them tick when they interact with their device? What do they want? What do they expect? How can you add value to their life? And remember, just because it’s a ‘mobile’, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re on the move.
Browsing: Anytime, Any place, Anywhere... Anyhow
Today’s browsing experience is usually constrained to a 2D window within our chosen operating system. But we’re surrounded by far richer opportunities. Higher bandwidth capability, multi touch devices, higher resolution capability and improved interactive capabilities of platforms like Adobe Flash, Silverlight html5, css and Javascript will start to push the design concepts of web-based solutions.
In 2010 we need to start to see the browser more as a stage with depth and media convergence, combining video, audio, images, text-based content, and community together within the browsing environment. Interface technology will see further innovation as iptv set-top browsing, mobile and multi-touch devices gain momentum with consumers.
How do users navigate their TV from their sofa? How can the gaming world improve the web browsing experience? Convergence between media and the type of devices available in the digital home will challenge the fundamentals of our current browsing experience. To stay ahead in this space we need to watch the digital home, watch audiences and watch the devices they are using to access the web.
Cloud Control: Living Life in the Cloud
Cloud and cloud-based thinking were very much the big thing in 2009 if you knew what it meant. The cloud means one thing to the technology world, it means a very different thing to the average consumer or business.
2010 will see this niche phrase spill over into the non-technical world. Our life in the cloud will become something we start to notice, and managing that life in the cloud will become an even bigger thing. Major technology providers like Microsoft, Google and Apple are providing clever tools to synchronise your life in the cloud with the many different devices with which you access it. Livemesh and MobileMe are examples of this functionality coming together. But these just handle your stuff and your devices, what about your family, your friends, your interests and your community? How does your world synchronise with your stuff and your devices?
Questions, questions, questions
How do you manage your tweets, Facebook friends, and Linkedin associates with your email, your schedule, your life? How do you maintain separation when it’s needed and provide collaboration and integration when required? More importantly how do you monitor it all, how can you watch the conversation, participate in it, ignore it, filter it? Will Google Wave provide some answers?
Our life in the cloud has never been more complicated and 2010 will see the start of innovative solutions to manage our new life; digital agencies have a perfect opportunity to grab a real problem that needs a real solution. So let’s look forward to some really creative and innovative solutions.
“Cloud based solutions is a technology term for software and computing services provided through the internet”
Web Watching: The Importance of Online Monitoring
A recent industry report found nearly half of companies do not monitor their reputations online which is the digital equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and pretending no one is talking about you. With so many free tools available, it’s hard to believe there are still so many barriers to businesses listening to their customers.
Fear exists because once they have the information, they don’t know what to do with it. For businesses facing this dilemma with limited resources and budget cuts, it has been up to agencies to deliver a cost-effective monitoring solution that goes beyond the data into interpretation, analysis and strategies on when and how to respond.
In 2010, we’ll see an increase in companies adopting the standard practice of listening to their customers, which will become even easier with the introduction of more filtering and sentiment tools, meaning the most relevant comments will be immediately recognisable.
Searching for an answer
The speed of the social web will increase dramatically as the battle over real-time search begins. Search engines are embracing social networks, as demonstrated by the introduction of tweets appearing in Google searches, and so there will also be increased emphasis on managing reputation in real-time.
This makes online PR a centre-point because customers’ opinions can no longer be ignored. Instead of static, managed websites and communities it will be users’ comments which appear on search results, shaping reputation minute by minute. This will have a direct impact on a brand’s bottom line. The importance of building independent brand advocates and positioning employees in roles to manage this constant stream of comments will become essential to ensure search results remain positive 24 hours a day.
Social Gets Strategic
Companies are beginning to embrace Social Media as a strategic opportunity to promote and deliver on their brand promises.
However, rather than partake in a little dipping of toes 18-24 months ago, companies have waited until social media has gone mainstream; they are panicking and that’s leading to some questionable decision-making, shooting from the hip rather than from strong marketing thinking, data insight and customer knowledge.
The outcome is that brands are rushing online and transferring to agencies with strong social media capability the responsibility for how their brand listens, responds and behaves online.
Measuring success
This is a happy time for agencies and there is no questioning that this is an effective way to handle Social Media challenges, certainly when a business’s own understanding and knowledge is in its infancy. However, it is questionable whether this is a long-term strategy– effectively outsourcing the voice of the business and the way it handles its reputation online. 2010 will see companies beginning to organise themselves in a more measured way.
Companies will begin to establish strong strategic frameworks in which to execute Social Media activities.
Companies will begin to set up internal cross-discipline teams comprising, at the very least, Marketing, PR and legal. These teams will be responsible for establishing the policies and infrastructure that will govern how the business participates in Social Media – tone of voice, who responds, legal workflow and so on...
Companies should not try to retain all responsibility internally. Agencies will continue to have much to offer in this evolving landscape, but this should not replace taking responsibility within the business and, crucially, as a business, not just as a marketing department.
How to use an agency:
- Specialist skills in understanding social media channels
- Strength in identifying content opportunities
- Strength in identifying key influencers and starting dialogue
- Advice on how to set up channels, monitoring and responding
- Training to internal teams to undertake monitoring and response in-house
Search and Conversion Optimisation continues to Advance
The latter half of 2009 saw much advancement in the search world with universal search results (images, videos, news, product search, maps and whitepapers) appearing in more searches and real-time search being integrated into our search experience. These advancements enable us to find a wider selection of the most up-to-date content, more easily than ever before. Google’s migration to using AJAX technology to speed up how long it takes them to query their data centres and return search results has made this even quicker as part of their much anticipated Caffeine update currently expected to be fully rolled out early in 2010.
We believe that 2010 will continue to be a big year for search particularly as many of the search technologies that have emerged over the past few years will start to come into their own and become standard practice for online marketers. Examples include user experience and conversion optimisation analysis platforms, and engagement mapping and attribution modelling software; both important when discovering the value of online advertising and what visitors are doing once they arrive at your website.
2010 will spell the end of marketers only taking the last click into account when determining which forms of online advertising are generating conversions the most cost-effectively. A considered approach to attribution modelling will interpret data more fairly and reflect how each form of online advertising is contributing to the success of the website so that marketers are better informed when considering discontinuing one type of activity based solely on traditional ROI metrics. This will allow for advertising channels that influence internet users earlier in the buying cycle.
Some other Key Search Trends for 2010:
- Online brands will branch out into international/multilingual search, resulting in a need for globalised content in some areas
- As mobile technology becomes mainstream, mobile search will take hold
- Google’s ‘Caffeine’ algorithm update (due early in 2010) is expected to place greater emphasis and a rank boost on Social Media sites.
- Even more Google technology advancements including technologies to ascertain the context and sentiment of brand/product citations on the web.
Analytics Grows Up
As the importance of digital as a business delivery channel grows, analytics will only become more significant, and we expect in 2010 to see the maturing of analytics in two different ways.
The first is about how analytics data is used in a business and, shock horror, this isn’t about the technology. There has to be a rationalisation of data and metrics to get to a point where a clear dashboard of useful information is available, and not just to marketing teams, but to customer service, front line operations etc.
Currently, despite reams of data and a stated priority for analytics, data captured by marketers is very rarely utilised. Analytics today for many organisations is a well-rehearsed troupe performing to an empty theatre.
So we advocate for 2010 to be the year of dashboards! Sketch it on paper first (what is it you want to determine?) before turning to the software, and consider the following trends in the way analytics is maturing:
- Analytics and insights will extend beyond pure clickstream (how many visits, visitors etc.) to combine a greater knowledge of site visit outcomes (how many downloads, request for… etc) and voice of customer (onsite surveys etc)
- Analytics will begin to tie into a single customer profile combining web statistics, CRM data, search engine data etc
The second change we are starting to see is in the sophistication of software available to deliver behavioural marketing solutions.
Good behaviour
This isn’t strictly analytics but the point here is there are pieces of software available, such as Netmining, which provide software that will create algorithms built by analysing the way people use your site and will deliver content and services at the right time in the decision-making process.
Does this sound like the sort of thing you’re looking to achieve through your analytics? And that’s before your monthly statistics report has even been delivered to your desk!
A note of caution, however: software algorithms are no substitute for understanding data within the broader business and marcomms context. They do not give any insight into the reasons why users behave in the way they do and they don’t determine what to do next with your website. They are just one of a number of tools for consideration. There is no silver bullet for analytics.
Portable Content: Everybody’s Talking About It
It might seem like a rather banal comment to make, but businesses are slowly waking up to the fact that if their digital presence is not working, then the answer might not be a simple change in content management system (or, indeed, agency). For many yes, clunky and overly burdensome technologies that do not cope with a much more open and portable technology era are genuine problems; however, more often than not even though we’re working on web projects, content is too often the last thing on our clients’ minds.
We expect to see a much greater focus on content in 2010, which is being driven by two key factors:
- 2010 will see businesses beginning to really embrace the use of video in their communications, both in a corporate and a campaign context
- We will also see a much greater demand for portable content as companies begin to develop content that will live onsite and offsite.
This will present challenges in terms of authoring multipurpose content that will live on many parts of the web and for SEO to maximise the value of your content wherever it lives on the web. But get it right, and your brand will extend way beyond its current confines.
Your site isn’t the Only one that Counts
Until very recently content and messaging was very much the domain of onsite. The rise of social media has changed this forever. Your core audiences are living online but not coming to visit you, and whilst advertising will continue to play a major part in reaching audiences offsite, brands must consider how they can have a strong and long presence within offsite communities and other information sources.
- Onsite is defined as corporate web presence – website, SEO, analytics.
- Offsite is defined as the wider Internet – social media networks and platforms, portals, news sites, information intermediaries etc.
2009 was very much about ‘being seen’ offsite with brands rushing to tweet, set up Facebook groups, publish videos to YouTube etc. 2010 will be about a more considered approach, establishing a rationale behind the use of social media tools, integrating community engagement/ social media activity into wider comms activities and, critically, developing a clear way for on- and off-site content, calls to action etc. to work together.
So how do you enable your business to consider on-site/off-site together?
- Use a reputation/buzz monitoring package to monitor conversations about your brand and the subjects you’re interested in
- Combine monitoring insights with any other intelligence at your disposal – web analytics/ customer surveys/ SEO terms etc
- Devise your story (content and messaging - but trust us, storytelling will be massive moving forward) at an atomic level. What bits live on your corporate website, what do you want to use You Tube, Flickr and the like for (premiering exclusive content, perhaps)? If you have strong communities around your brand e.g. car enthusiasts/health and nutrition conscious etc., identify the prominent sites where these people engage. What would you want to say to a community? Can you create innovative sponsorships, closed-door think tanks etc?
Working your brand and campaigns both on- and off-site will be a big challenge but it will make everyone think longer and harder about their content, leading to more effective messaging and better quality content, which can be no bad thing.
A New Corporate Journalism
In our work we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about campaigns or specific pieces of functionality and content that support the marketing of products and services. Recently, many of our clients have begun to talk to us more about the ‘corporation’ and how the corporation as a brand needs to evolve its presence digitally.
There are many catalysts for this, not least the meteoric rise of Social Media, and the subsequent need to monitor and manage reputations with an expediency and exposure hitherto unknown.
The other key point is that pre-internet, the ‘corporation’ used to talk about itself, in the press, the mainstream media, even in the corridors of Whitehall on a touch-point by touch-point basis. The internet, however, has turned the corporate brand into an always on-entity, which can be accessed at any time and in any place.
On top of this is the rise of video and the growth of mobile applications etc. is transforming not just what we communicate but how.
Once upon a time
Whilst the internet has altered greatly, by and large a corporate’s digital presence remains confined to the corporate website, which has seen little evolution. These recent changes all present a major shift in the way companies can represent themselves through digital channels.
Brands will increasingly start to see themselves as publishers, with editors and staff/contract journalists operating as core members of a marcomms team. We fully expect to see the brand as storyteller, using its own distribution platforms, taking advantage of rich media capabilities, content portability and using the intelligence gleaned from monitoring activities to generate topics, produce content and respond to and be part of an online dialogue about their business and the subjects that are important to it.
Understanding what makes Users Tick
In the last few years, we have been using personas to add a real world focus and understanding to the user-centred design process. Personas build pictures of target users as ‘real people’ based on market research and observations of real end users or target customers. Persona development is becoming deeper and richer, but still paints incomplete pictures of users. Observation provides the external manifestation of user behaviour but it does not give us insights into why they may behave in certain ways.
We can make assumptions about the reason why they do, but what really makes them tick? How do they make decisions? What influences their behaviour? How are they likely to react in certain situations? To answer these questions we need to look to other sources for deeper insights.
Understanding the psychology of users in terms of issues such as choice, influence, confidence, and behavioural change can provide a much richer picture of users. Not only what they do, but also why they do it. At Amaze we have termed this ‘digital psychology’, and is something we will be focussing on in 2010 through our work with academia and industry practitioners. But what does it mean and what can it do?
Insightful strategy
There are various models and theories developed through years of research that can be applied to user experience design. For example, the stages of change model was originally developed to explain or predict a person’s success or failure in achieving a proposed change in behaviour – e.g. quitting smoking. This can provide insights into how to develop a digital engagement strategy and how to communicate in other situations where long-term sustained behavioural change is the goal.
Behavioural economics can also give insights into how users may react and how to best influence their behaviour. One simple example is prospect theory. Prospect theory is about the fact that people experience a greater emotional response to loss than to gain. If a proposition is put to a user in terms of what they will gain by acting – say switching utility provider, then it will provide less emotional response than if the proposition was in terms of what they will loose by not switching.
These examples are not based on what can be gathered by observing a few individual users but are based on underlying psychological behaviours which are exhibited by the population at large. Knowing more about what makes users “tick” and how they are likely to respond, and why, lifts user experience design to the next level.
Authors: Nick Bradshaw, Natalie Gross, Liane Grimshaw, Managing Partners, Amaze