We all know that the digital landscape is important and can’t be ignored anymore. Data shows customers are actively engaging in digital services and are willing to utilize or purchase services instantly. In such a scenario, it becomes essential to put your best foot forward and attract an online audience.
In this blog, we’re discussing three key areas that are essential to staying ahead of your competition in the digital world: Community, Communication & Commerce.
Community
In the digital publishing world, our community is made up of content producers (writers, designers, etc.), salespeople (ad sales, product sales, etc.), and, of course, consumers (readers in specific demographics). The first thing to bear in mind is that our community is made up of people! Individuals with their own motivations and free will.
To build a stronger community, we need to reach out to them and let them know what we’ve built and what they can gain from it, over and over again. Community also means creating ways for people to provide feedback, and then being responsive to that feedback. Asking “How can we help?” “How can we be better?” can drive improvements and help in segmenting the messages. Curate different messages for different levels of users or users with different interests.
In the print world, organizations have suffered from the lack of an active community as a user gets a bump of interest for a day or two when a new issue or service releases, and then the community forgets till their next issue or release comes in the market. Digital helps to overcome this problem, it enables us to dribble out “snackable” content over the whole month and keep our community engaged every day.
Communication
One can hardly say they have a community if the communication only happens in one direction. One-way communication can be the death of revenue streams. At the same time, it’s essential to avoid the temptation to bombard our audience with information and other data in an effort to be heard.
Instead of raising our voice, we need to focus on shifting our processes to encourage and facilitate two-way communication between our brand and readers. We can stay in touch by producing quality content in the form of blogs and social media posts or immediately contact in the form of notifications and feedback forms.
Analytics can help us as it uncovers which methods are helping us communicate with the audience and what methods are incurring more costs than profits. Based on the obtained metrics, we need to optimize and improve workflow. However, we need to be careful while analyzing the parameters, say just counting downloads or page views is not enough and we need to consider other options like engagement, etc.
Commerce
To succeed in digital publishing from a commerce perspective, we have to stay relevant. The community and communication strategies above lay the groundwork. We need to build on them by using simple and affordable tools and be willing to stay the course! Whether slow or fast, we need to keep moving at our own pace.
Another great strategy is to find partners to leverage our brand. Teaming up with others help in both expanding our reach and communities.
To wrap up, when we align our community and communication with commerce,
we get a recipe for digital success.
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