Parts Make Up The Whole

Modern businesses are complex. While many appear to be structured the same – containing departments, facilities, people, ideas and technology – the truth is each company is as unique as every person you pass on the way to the coffee shop, or grocery store. Projecting the physical products, visual identity, verbal tone or mission of a business out into a hurried and distracted digital ecosystem requires a cohesive strategy.  The cornerstone of a successful digital strategy is developing a consistent and compelling digital identity.

The Challenge We Face Is The Human Attention Span

A goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds. The average human, on the other hand, clocks in at 8! To put it plainly, your customers are distracted. Multitasking rules their world, which recent studies have debunked as an effective time management skill. According to eConsultancy, 40% of your site visitors will leave if it takes more than 3 seconds for a page to load, and 88% of those folks are never coming back. These customers frequently move across devices, often using more than one at the same time. Nielsen reports that a majority of U.S. households have HDTVs, computers, smartphones and spend an average of 60 hours a week consuming content across multiple devices. This landscape of distraction and media consumption is growing exponentially. For proof, just look to Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, blogs, Snapchat, Tindr, YouTube, Facebook, Flappy Bird and whatever app is next in line, promising to solve our problems and bring us joy. The fact is, social networks and blogs now account for 25% of total time Americans spend online.  Gaining your customers attention is harder than ever. Keeping it is even harder.

Fight Distraction With Personality & Cohesive Communication

At Spyder Trap, we like to use the human body as an analogy for our client’s digital ecosystem. Because, much like our bodies, our organizations won’t get far if all the parts are out of sync. You can’t run a five minute mile if you haven’t trained your legs. Likewise, your site won’t perform well if you don’t develop a proper content strategy.

Businesses as Digital Citizens

The heart of your organization’s digital identity is the website. Your site serves as the clearest digital representation of your business on the web. On the other hand, the brains of your organization’s digital organism are your tracking metrics and analytics. These inform actions you take in the digital world. Your blogs, microsites, YouTube videos, and landing pages do the legwork. They help get your message and identity out in all of the most important areas where your customers find content. Finally, social media, email campaigns, paid search, and organic search are your organizations outreach components. All of these parts combine to form your organization’s digital identity. Thinking of your organization’s digital identity as a person, your business should be asking a few important questions. Do people perceive your organization’s digital identity as:

• Authentic?
• Honest?
• Someone people want to interact with?
• Intelligent?
• As a single unified voice and personality?
• Informative?

You probably don’t want your organization’s online personality to be perceived as:

• Pushy or pitchy
• Confused, with multiple personalities
• Indifferent
• Overwhelmingly talkative and one-way in communication

How about reputation? Do you want people to search for your organization and find negative reviews and fragmented voices or inconsistent branding across your digital properties? Are you worried about what people may find out about your organization on the web?

Recap & Recommendations

There’s a lot to take into account, when building out the component parts of your digital body. The most important piece of advice we can give is to remember that each part of your organization’s digital identity is connected. Each of the parts must work in sync. For example, your banner ad or PPC copy should have a similar tone than the landing pages linked to by the ads. Email campaigns should utilize analytics to ensure that users receive messaging that is based on open rates, clickthrough metrics, and A/B testing of content. Websites must accommodate users and blog content that speaks to a target audience with a tone that is engaging and targeted, instead of generic.

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