Creating digital differentiation

If I had to choose a new activity that I was truly passionate about, I would live digital all over again. Every tweet, every post, every click, every thumb gesture, every entry, every exit, every movement is the real-time confirmation of a hypothesis.

Finding a job that lets you live the Hegelian dynamic of thesis, hypothesis and synthesis every second is the dream of anyone passionate about learning. It has always frustrated me to hear a cynic state flatly that life is like this and is never going to change. And the luck of those of us who work in digital is being able to see a theory torn apart every day, and to watch a completely unexpected hypothesis prove true because a user wanted it to.

I have spent time in my life focused on creating strategy and surrounded by theoretical statements about "customer centricity". What's lucky about working in digital is that every one of those blocks that could not be moved collapses in a matter of months, years. The eruption of new ways of doing business has wrecked models that were considered eternal. And then the beauty of a new way of doing things that respects what users want has emerged. Digital is "customer centric". There are no tricks. The user chooses. Now nobody can question that it is the user who makes the decisions.
There is a component of revolution in this new society of users, and that component comes with the fairness of knowing that the user can no longer be fooled. Gone are the days of unplugging a fax machine so as not to receive cancellations, of putting a customer through hell when they tried to cancel their contracts. Now a click changes a company's reality and opens up new possibilities.

The business potential of digital has opened up the free movement of users. Everything flows. And a tweet, a post, a click, a thumb gesture, an entry and an exit change a company's P&L. And the user is the one who decided, from the sofa at home. And it is quite possible that the first information they consumed was standing at a bus stop, on their phone.

I believe that the big advantage in this new competitive environment is no longer set simply by bricks and mortar or by budget. It is created out of the skill of marketing professionals when it comes to creating, distributing and bringing closer the content that helps the user make purchase decisions. Content and the tools to automate content distribution are the new lever. The use of rules and variables that bring that information closer to the user who is in the process of making a purchase decision is already the great competitive barrier.

If you work in digital, I invite you to mull over the following reflections as a lever for setting out your bases for differentiation:

1. Create content that doesn't talk about your products or services; create content that helps the decision. Every one of the investments I made in the past was aimed at talking about the virtues of my product or service. That investment no longer makes sense unless it is aimed at helping the user decide. You will probably face a difficult conversation with other decision-makers in your company. The second conversation will be easier if you are able to measure each piece of content's contribution to the final conversion. It is possible.
2. Content is made of words. Every piece of content that helps a user make a purchase decision has a keyword, an alt text, a tag, a title or a bio behind it. Arrange the words so that they do more than half the work on their own. It is worth not investing in bringing traffic in if you have not yet sorted out these basics.
3. Learn to make out each and every one of the levers within your reach. A blog can be the best tool for generating purchase opportunities for your users. You only have to use that traffic at the moments when people are looking for information. Don't let a returning user get the same treatment. You already know them: are you sure you can't tell them something new? Are you sure you can't get more information in exchange for new content?
4. The information is inside and also outside. There is far more useful information than you can imagine in user behaviour outside your digital assets. And if you are also able to join that information up with your analytics, you can end up creating alchemy. How many purchase offers are segmented by a user's potential value on the basis of the company's own variables? Isn't a user's capacity to influence a new source of potential value?
5. Not all your metrics are contained in a funnel. Thinking in digital and limiting all your metrics to the results of a funnel means losing breadth of vision. There is much more information in user behaviour before and after going through that magic funnel. Give the user the chance to choose how she or he buys and let them assess your offer. Calmly. Even if they don't convert with you online. Now, learn to measure that activity outside your digital analytics.
6. Users are people. Work on joining up the information from access, visits and events and decoding it into people. If you are not yet able to do it, it is worth investing in someone who helps you do that work before you carry on squandering money on campaigns and fooling yourself with improvements in CPC, CPM or CPA. Whoever invented the CPC also invented the GRP. Now it's up to you. I prefer to talk about accompanying people.
7. Your learning curve can be optimised too. If each of the actions you take or each of the pieces of content you create has brought you no learning, there is part of your work that you are throwing in the bin. The ability to measure every interaction with your users in real time lets you test several formats, several subject lines, several buttons and optimise, within a single action, the whole action. And that optimisation can happen in a single day. It is all a question of volume and of skill in choosing the alternatives.

And now try taking the differentiation test: do you get your offer across to your digital customers, or do you help your users decide? I prefer the second option.

This post was originally published on http://bernardocrespovelasco.blogspot.com.es/2015/03/creando-diferenciacion-digital.html

Bernardo Crespo is an Ontological coach certified by Newfield Network in Bogotá (Colombia). Degree in Business Studies from UCLM and final year of a BA Honours in Management and Economics, University of St Andrews.
Executive Master in Relationship Marketing, CRM and E-commerce from ICEMD, and lecturer at various business schools in Spain.
I have discovered, and go on discovering, the beauty of play applied outside of play #gamification

I currently work as head of Digital Marketing at BBVA Spain.