A brand’s audience is no longer in its backyard, around the corner or just in the city or province. The audience is everywhere in the world, wherever it wants to be, using every device imaginable to interact with the brand. Understanding that simple fact gives the brand perspective. Brands find it difficult to provide the kind of experience their visitors expect online. The Internet is bringing the brand and its consumers closer with every passing moment.

A digital presence offers an opportunity for differentiation. The Website is the heart of a brand’s digital ecosystem/presence, the amalgamation of all of a brand’s digital activities through which a brand forms its relationships. Not only is the website the easiest destination to control, it can also be the most interactive. A decade ago when I first started offering my website expertise to brands, there were nothing more than newspaper-like static display of the brochures and leaflets of the brand/offerings. But just think of today’s scenario: There are interactive, device-responsive, integrating combined technologies from social networking sites such as FB, Twitter, YouTube, blog, and software that facilitates creating a memorable and personalised experience for the visitors each time they visit the brand website. The mechanism of delivering a high-performing website is as important as providing the right content for the right relationship needs. It’s all about giving the visitors what they want.

Everything related to technology is getting continuously better, smaller, faster and cheaper but websites are on a different path. They are getting better, but along the way they are getting bigger, slower, and more expensive. Consumer expectation has followed suit. Affordability empowered by technology has made consumer demands more unrealistic than ever. As per Google, even 400 milliseconds, which is the blink of an eye, is being considered too long during an online search; that’s because today’s consumers have unlimited choice virtually. The competition is just one click away. There is no barrier to change and the cost for doing so is almost zero. There are obvious and tangible business repercussions for brands with slow websites. It’s obvious that if visitors are leaving the website, the brand will lose business. What’s not so obvious is the long-term impact of poor user experience on relationships with the visitors.

Providing consumers an awesome experience acknowledges that they have a choice. Brands must be more helpful, more quickly responsive, than their peers (competitions). And us new-age marketers must focus on engaging the visitors by offering them a great experience every time they visit our brand’s website. When the visitors get what they want – a faster loading website through which to experience the brand, the brand earns their attention and heightens the potential to build engagement and relationships.

Delivering the digital ROI In their book The Experience Economy , James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II explained about brands staging an experience whenever they try to engage with their customers, connecting with them in a personal and memorable way. It means everyone is selling an experience to build a relationship. Every digital touch point promises an experience to build for the brand and with the right experience the return on investment (ROI) gets delivered. The authors emphasise factors such as spending attention, generating engagement, providing the right experience and how these influence relationships with the audience or customers.

As per PwC’s digital innovation advisory group, Internet and the digital platforms are triggering a third wave of capitalism that will transform businesses, brands and nations which will lead to extraordinary wealth creation around the world. Internet in a real sense is a globalised medium (in India 300 million users, as per IAMAI).

Users of smart devices are using their mobile devices not only frequently, not only as part of their multi-device activities (such as tablet at home, smartphone on the go, desktop or laptop at office) but with the same expectations they have from the website when sitting at their desks. This is alarming considering the fact that mobile or network connectivity is inherently unpredictable in a country such as India. The digital experience or ROI which the consumer expects from the brand will depend on the variable bandwidth environment, for example, when a mobile device can switch from WiFi to 3G to 2G or 4G and everywhere in between. For a slower response or experience the users or consumers will hold the brand responsible.

The mobile experience Along with delivering a good mobile experience, the brand needs to get its content and site to show up on those devices in the first place. There is no standard formula for this even if we have RWD (responsive web design). Not having a mobile version of the website is suicidal in today’s digitally super-charged world. Mobile technology provides the brands a great deal of detailed information that can help personalise and most importantly, customise, the context of the experience for the brand’s audience. Once the brands know they are engaging with content through a mobile device, they can tailor the experience for someone who is on the go (even a commuter on the Delhi or Mumbai Metro). Still it’s always challenging to present the content appropriately as per the expectation of the consumers but the most daunting task is the scalability of these digital experiences. The brand site or property needs to load fast, without wait.

Browser dynamics With static digital content in the cache and the dynamic content being accelerated, there is only one place left for optimisation and that is the browser. A web page optimised for one browser may end up performing terribly on another browser. A system within a network (or a service provider’s network) looks at the incoming request and detects the browser type and then returns the data optimised to that requesting browser. This allows a brand or business to specify what gets loaded first. Like the digital perception problem, when the audience of a brand sees non-essential or non-interactive elements loading first, their perception of the speed of the digital experience is formed. A crisp optimisation process ensures that the important elements such as CTA (call to action), menus or videos are loaded fast even if the rest of the page is still loading.

For brands and businesses, implementing specific strategies to optimise the digital experience and provide the fastest possible delivery will be an ongoing activity. There are elements such as web servers, application servers, databases, third-party technologies, routers, switches, disk-drivers, and this list goes on. These elements produce data, which can help the brand owners to understand performance. While analysing the data, brands can get a sense of the system level impact on its website performance. Failing to provide the content and the speed that their audience/consumers want can undermine every opportunity to engage and form everlasting relationships.

Aroon Kumar is Director - Marketing and Digital Engagement, mGage India

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