Focusing on what the newest, trendiest, most prominent or even the most well recommended designs or development frameworks for your digital presence is what your designer and developer should do in their spare time. When dealing with your website redesign or content/social channel execution they should be learning from your ongoing data collection about who your customers are and what they want to achieve. This assigns them the task of making interface and code improvements to make it easier, faster and more pleasurable for your website users in a specific, measurable way.
If all you’re doing is looking to what Apple, AirBnB, and Uber are doing on the surface layer and trying to replicate that hoping for similar success – you’re essentially doing what a little league baseball player might do in copying a major leaguers swing in order to produce homeruns.
Don’t copy the end results of design aesthetics or application functionality. Instead focus on practicing the fundamentals:
- Know who you are and why you are in business. Be clear and honest with yourself about why you matter to the world and to the people who buy or relate to your goods and services.
- Ask those people who they are! What are they like? What behaviours, ideas, motivations and tasks do they come to you with?
- What are the 20% of those thigns that account for 80% of your revenue?
- Do you have a logical, and intuitive information architecture to allow people to navigate their way through those tasks as they go from “problem unaware” through to information gathering, research, analysis, comparison and finally into a purchase decision frame of mind? Or are you presenting a digital brochure with insincere, poorly thought out copy and unhelpful imagery followed by a “Interested yet? Buy Now/Call us/Submit Q”?
Being good at digital doesn’t mean looking like or behaving like the trendiest and most cutting edge sites that your design, development and editorial team is following in their spare time. It’s about getting the knowledge and expertise you do so well in person and offline into a digital framework. Only AFTER you’ve really need these fundamentals do you get to graduate from little league and begin to identify what the path to the majors looks like.
Copying a digital strategy without first having the frameworks, mechanics and knowledge of details ingrained in your operations and marketing teams is simply copying a homerun swing, calling your shot, and then closing your eyes at the moment of contact. Not a very effective way to spend your digital dollars and will likely result in your putting off marking modernization yet again because “it didn’t work”.