Dissolving the Line Between Your Business’ Physical & Digital Experience
Today’s myth: “I don’t sell online, so online marketing isn’t important for my business”
Me and three other members of the Trafiki team attended the MESC+R conference in Dubai earlier this week, an event dedicated to connecting retailers, mall owners, and service providers throughout the Middle East with one another.
Given the vibrant mall culture of the city and surrounding GCC region, unsurprisingly, much of the event was centred around the physical retail experience.
E.g. mall owners on the hunt for mall analytics software that will help them understand their customers or indoor positioning platforms that will help customers navigate the building.
Whilst we have struck up some amazing connections, I noticed a common theme when talking to other attendees about what we do as a company and the value we’re able to provide to their business.
In particular, I found myself constantly having to explain the importance of a fantastic digital presence for entirely physical businesses!
What became apparent was that many businesses (whose sales came entirely from physical interactions) did not properly value their digital presence. I will attempt to demonstrate why this is the case by comparing the language I heard throughout the event — describing the physical retail experience — with the language of digital marketing.
The physical experience:
The digital experience:
Despite describing the same core ideas, these terms vary according to their physical or digital context.
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For me, this linguistic difference exemplifies that people do not intuitively connect the success of their physical business to their digital presence. The two exist independently of each other in many people's eyes.
Take customer experience vs. user experience as an example. Speakers at the MECS+R event (rightly so) repeatedly emphasised the importance of customer experience. In other words, the importance of affecting the way that your customers feel about your brand.
“A great experience at the mall will create great memories” was a common thread throughout the speeches. These great memories are what will influence the customer – both consciously and subconsciously – to return.
Just as physical places can help foster great experiences that will lead to loyal customers, so too can websites. This, however, is far less publicised and discussed, especially in the GCC market (otherwise I would have heard a lot more about “user experience” at the event…)
The only difference between creating a good experience for your customers in the physical vs. digital world is the factors that contribute to it differ.
A good CX at the mall is created through offering a good range of popular brands and helpful shop assistants, whilst good website UX is created through product personalisation and quick load times.
Importantly, however, the feeling and the action they produce are the same. In both instances, a good experience will conjure customer satisfaction and loyalty (feeling) and make you more likely to return to use that business/service (action).
Many studies have found good UX leads to higher conversion rates and, more importantly, an increase in repeat customers. Despite this, many multi-billion dollar shopping malls throughout the Middle East are (quite obviously) barely investing in their website and their digital presence. Thus, they are missing out on an opportunity to expand their customer base and outperform their competitors.
I want to help change this by dissolving the line between the digital and physical experience in the minds of business owners.
All I need to do is to convince them of the value of their digital presence so that they will properly invest in it and directly benefit from the decision! Exercises like this newsletter are my attempt at doing so.
Invest in your digital presence and reap the physical rewards.
Are there any marketing myths that you want me to debunk? Please feel free to comment or message me about a problem you are facing/have faced as a business owner or a marketer, so I can tackle it in a future newsletter.