Businesses need to seek to embrace the Website's power as if it is like a Gravitational-Wave of Customers. In your industry spacetime, there is a new accelerated process generated in the COVID 19 new business world; ideas quickly propagate as trends or 'waves' as digital education travel at the speed of light to your customers.
It will be your multi-channel Digital Voice that connects (online, social, mobile, or in-person) to address these customers first!
We are all navigating a 'new normal' that is steadily becoming an exhausting reality. Between an economic downturn, tightening budgets, and changing consumer trends, there isn't a single industry that hasn't felt the challenge to adapt.
As a result, the urgency of assuring you have a great website and social presence has never been more vital, and the risks of not moving forward are no longer tolerable.
In the past, a website's operational role is exact — it's keeping pace with market demands and the rest of the business's needs. The social media strategy varied independently. At worst, it is a rallying point to focus your business value. For organizations attempting a transition, it is either a sound technical foundation (multi-voice implementation) and driver of innovation or an omnipresent friction source that casts a shadow over anything that touches it (old school responsive templates and social with separate purposes). As the new normal becomes more familiar, it's worth digging into how a business leverages the web and social together is make-or-break.
It's all About Brand Consistency
A website, your blog, your social media are a business's public face to the world. It is the foundation of customer trust in a moment of chaos or uncertainty, both internally and externally. In these current circumstances, it is the portal to the company itself. Every employee from C-Suite executives to new hires must be confident that the Website is doing its job — just as they would trust a colleague or business partner talking to their best customer or prospect.
It must convey the right message, with the company strategy and vision, and that its operational role in your organization is well defined and flawlessly executed to address online, social, mobile, and support in-person contact.
A UNIVERSAL TRUTH
You can't worry whether the Website value proposition, is different from Social Media, and the In-person a third value proposition! They all must show up for work when it's needed or it will crumble with a lack of trust and customer confusion.
The Committee Effort
Allocating time and energy to a website and social media with the same voice is tricky in and of itself. When there are many stakeholders, they can put in an overburdened "all things to all people" position. This effort leads to committee efforts, a slog in the best of times but can become absolute gridlock when things get chaotic and teams become scattered. If the Website and Social Media help guide an organization through a turbulent transition and eventually become a critical digital touchpoint, leadership needs to create clarity of purpose, ideally including key metrics.
Purpose can take several forms and is measured in different ways. Is the Website geared towards lead-gen or eCommerce? Is it trying to track unique users like a media or content site? Or daily active users like a campaign or community? Then add ontop Social Media each having purpose and has its implications for digital communications. Baseline stability and uptime are like air and water — without them, nothing else matters. However, the genuinely make-or-break capacity is the ability to react quickly and make adjustments using a multi-channel approach.
If you have a website that needs to create a project out of a text change, and your Social Media is more current... all you have in a website is a brochure online!
IN SUMMARY
Adapting To The Gravitational-Wave of Customers Requires Agility
Having a single voice and value proposition is one that starts small and makes contact with the market faster via an agile approach. A strong understanding of the web site and social media purpose is a prerequisite for increased velocity. Mission clarity enables quick decision-making; a lack thereof can be debilitating.