If you or your business have had a website for a while, chances are, it’s changed on more than one occasion. Online trends come and go, markets eventually respond to the status quo and yearn for new things, and websites must remain fresh to drive engagement in the long term.
And depending on what’s currently working within your market, updating a website can involve so much more than simple content rewrites and design changes. When new technology hits the market, you need to focus on being the first (and the best) to enrich your customer experience with it.
But figuring out what to focus on can be tricky. Your data analytics will play a huge part in driving your strategy, forming a complete picture of what’s working and what’s lacking on your website. Even still, it can be difficult to commit to a single theme of thinking.
To succeed and maintain a competitive edge over the marketplace, your website has to meet the escalating demands of the modern consumer. These are the significant worldwide trends that you should be considering:
The personal touch
When websites were new, a static experience was just fine. Every consumer arrived at the same pages, got the same automated emails and had the same experience start-to-finish. The newfound convenience the Internet was providing was awe-inspiring in and of itself – and there was no need to get too complex with personalising the individual consumer’s experience.
But times have changed. Now, the convenience of the Internet is an expectation rather than an innovation. Businesses use data from social media channels, retargeting campaigns and more to anticipate what a consumer will want based on the behaviour of prior consumers.
Using this data as the cornerstone to a robust digital strategy, brands will deliver particular emails, direct consumers to particular pages and push particular products to carefully identified segments.
This approach results in consumers receiving a personalised, relevant and meaningful experience from the very outset of dealing with a brand. Right away, the brand is sending them messaging that they’re likely to resonate with, and every individual consumer feels understood.
It’s important to provide the same level of experience to your own consumers, and will only become more so over the coming years.
New technology and development
Websites need to work on phones, TVs, tablets, laptops and home computers. Gone are the days where visiting a website was restricted to the PC alone – now, consumers expect to be able to use the Internet effectively on any device that can access the Wi-Fi.
And with the progression of technology, that expectation could grow even wider. When Pokémon Go was released, it showed us a whole new era of possibility: Augmented reality. Now, with innovations such as Google Cardboard, you can experience a 3D world at home just using your smartphone.
Given the recency of this technology coupled with the speed of technological progression, it won’t be long before virtual reality is as comfortable and “normal” to use as your smartphone is now. Brands with long-term vision need to keep this in mind and be wary of how their competitors are using technology to improve their results and engagement.
