Make Every Interaction Count
Easier said than done right? Or is it? It’s actually pretty easy to do if you have the tools and the perspective you need for productive action. Here’s how to start (and never stop) optimizing your business for the things that matter most.
A-B-C, it’s easy as 1-2-3
Here’s the dope. There are 3 simple ingredients in the recipe for long-term impact that actually improves adaptability.
- Brand Strategy
Understand your organization, your goals, your audience, and their needs. - User Experience
Use human centered design (design thinking) to align needs and solutions. - Optimization
Adjust to remove obstacles and objections while capitalizing on opportunities over time.
Let’s dig in.
1. Brand Strategy
This is an oversimplification, but at the end of the day, brand strategy is about definition, persuasion, and market understanding. If you can’t answer these questions, you’re going to have a hard time.
- Why does the organization exist?
- Who is the organization trying to serve?
- What do those people need?
- Do we have what they need?
- Why the hell should they choose us?
SIDE RANT – This stuff is what stands between organizations and the effective use of tools like AI and agency partners. It’s what separates us from the animals (some of us anyway). ChatGPT can develop a “strategy” for you that is very sound from a tactical standpoint. But where is the north star? That is not something Bard, OpenAI, or half the organizations I’ve encountered have any ability to pinpoint without significant cerebral interference.
2. Human-Centered Design
Not to get all Nielsen Norman on you, but I love this quote.
“The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother.” – Don Norman & Jakob Nielsen
Design thinking, or human-centered design, is a well documented process to drive innovation (and optimization) by focusing on human behavior and needs. And that innovation doesn’t have to be a sea change; it’s totally microdoseable. Here’s a simplified breakdown you can apply to whatever level of transformation you’re in need of:
Observe > Empathize > Adapt
There are nuances and stages in there to explore, but that’s the gist.
Observe your audience and you’ll begin to understand them. This is more empirical than empathetic, but it’s a good place to start taking inventory. It’s more about the “what” you’re trying to solve. Observation helps you more clearly inventory and define problems.
Is there a path between your goals and their needs? What’s in the way? What more can we learn about these people and their behavior?
A Note on GA4 – Observation without data is pretty hard. If you haven’t prepared for GA4, you need to ASAP. Need help? We did an entry-level webinar with Blueprint you can check out here.
Empathize to understand the impact of the problems your audience is facing, because you’re “walking in their shoes.” Here we get into the “why” a problem needs to be solved. We frequently say that internal expertise can be an organization’s downfall. Your audience is not necessarily anything like you. By putting aside your personal biases and identifying with who you are trying to serve, you’ll be equipped to experiment and adapt.
Adapt your offerings. Or just adapt your presentation of your offerings. Once you know what the problems are, why they’re painful, and what’s in between your organizational goals and your audience needs, you can systematically remove obstacles and lean into opportunities. There’s a good deal of testing and experimentation here, but we generally find that by the time you’ve empathized, you have a pretty good idea of initial improvements that pay off rapidly.
3. Optimization
Staying connected to your audience, noticing when the audience begins to change, identifying emerging markets, and maintaining the human-centered design cycle makes you flexible. Adapting as things change is a lot easier than embarking on a “digital transformation.” Innovation can be bite-sized too. And bite-sized innovation is healthy, sustainable, and drives longevity.
Here are a few questions we never stop asking. When you look for answers to questions like these, you have a clear path to iterative growth through incremental (and continuous) optimization.
- What are we noticing about our current audience?
- How can we leverage what we notice through messaging and offerings?
- What obstacles prevent the audience from getting their job done?
- How can we remove those obstacles and improve the audience journey?
- What are the objections? When do they surface?
- How can we answer those objections effectively and efficiently?
See? It’s just common sense.
There you have it. This is our proven path to helping organizations grow. With a good attitude, you can use this simple formula to change the game. I hope you do! Let us know how it turns out.
