To be best at digital acquisition, its important to be connected into digital world, grow along with your customers and be omni-channel. A lot of organizations do a great job with one or two of these but not all. There are very few who have managed to make this a part of who they are and how they work to stay more plugged into the world.
Be connected to the digital world
- Experience digital platforms as a user first so you can help your organization find the best to use it and deliver value
The best way to connect to the digital world is to have a customer mindset first and then an organizational mindset. So, experience, use and test the digital phenomenon first as a customer and a regular user to understand how it can enrich your life. Only once you have done that, you can do a better job of determining how your organization could leverage it to generate value for customer, show value of a service, employee enrichment etc.
Many organizations make the mistake of jumping directly into how to use a platform for organization without the key decision makers and essential employees having spent time on that digital experience. In such cases, organizations and senior leadership fail to develop the kind of instinct you need to be ready to pivot quickly, communicate effectively and scale efficiently.
A perfect example would be the recent rise in TikTok’s popularity. Most of the organizations are trying to figure how to use it for their acquisition without the decision makers having used the platform themselves. In such situations they are reliant on their agencies to lead the direction or get inspired by what other organizations are doing. While larger enterprises can afford the luxury of hiring the best minds/companies to help them craft a strategy, smaller organizations are not resource rich for that.
While larger organizations have resources to hire the best minds, smaller organizations have the agility and nimbleness to test new platforms and digital experiences really fast. A perfect example would be AR (augment reality). While AR ads have been on the rise and are available within large scale advertising platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, a lot of large scale enterprises are still trying to figure out how to use it. Smaller organizations can do a much quicker job of testing it out and trying to reach new audiences by using free platforms like Spark AR.
Grow along with your customers i.e Know your Customer
Consumer habits and behaviors are constantly changing. Stay in touch with your customers to understand how they use your product, how they search for information around services/products similar to yours, where do they spend their time. One way to do this is through running quick surveys using a Google Survey form.
Another approach is to pay attention to:
- how people are spending their time these days
- staying connected to what VCs are investing in – They generally invest in things of the future.
- following the latest trends in acquisitions from big players like Google, FB – They are always keen to buy promising technologies to enhance their product suite and push the boundaries of new digital experiences
- ask people around you questions like:
- why do they use a digital platform or experience
- how do they use it
- how much time do they spend on it
- How soon do they get bored of a platform or a digital experience
Be willing to take a risk, test small and scale big
Digital world is constantly changing and being quick to pivot into new opportunities will make you better than anyone else in the market. This cannot happen unless:
- there is leadership willingness to take risks
- leadership support to fund resources for testing things quick
- the right mindset (agility, tenacity and data driven attitude) in all levels to ensure that the tests can be launched quickly and scaled up for bigger successes
The area where a lot of organizations fall short is in their willingness to take risk. This is true for larger organizations where leaders have the job to keep the ship steady. This automatically makes them more risk averse than less in a lot of organizations. Their attitude also flows down to the teams that report into them who follow the same suite and are happy with making quick optimizations for a 5-10% growth vs finding testing opportunities that could give a 50% if it worked and was scaled up.
While leadership does play a big role, I also find lack of analytical skills and the drive to find answers on your own as a big miss in employees these days. This is especially true in larger organizations where every task is assigned to a particular team which creates interesting silos and unnecessary process at times to get to the final answer. While start-ups are better at this because no silos exist, their leaders are also often very whimsical and make too many pivots which makes testing a challenge.