Digital Ideas was an inspiring day organized by Tam Tam Talks for a large group of online professionals and its own clients. The program covered a wide range of topics that will shape the future of the web.
Speakers:
- Annemiek van Leeuwen
- Bart Manuel
- Danijel Bonacic
- Pieter Aarts
- Japie Stoppelenburg
- Marijn Janssen
- Robin Aldenhoven
Highlights and key takeaways from the presentations:
The most beautiful websites aren’t always the ones with the highest conversion rates. That’s why he believes it’s so important to invest in experiments like A | B testing*. Testing with real visitors is how you end up with the most profitable website. Whatever you invest in usability will pay for itself over time. If you’re not tracking and evaluating data, you’re leaving money on the table!
Data matters, and you can get it from almost anywhere: search engines, social media, even whether people use a PC or a Mac. Knowing your users’ backgrounds and settings makes it easier to build profiles. Use the data that’s already out there. “Your entire life is online…”
Decide how you want to reach your goals. Is it about revenue, transactions, visitors, subscriptions, a download, a donation, or something else? Once you know, you can build a conversion funnel on your site: a logical path that gets visitors to that goal as quickly as possible. Naturally, you want as many people as possible to make it to the final step.
Nike has done this very effectively. By developing the Nike wristband, the company built a close-knit community of athletes and found an excellent way to gather information about its target audience and consumers. The campaign directs sports fans to the right channels.
Create your own product pages are a great way to see where the market is heading. Many car manufacturers now build interactive product pages like these to find out which colors, rims, and body kits people choose most often. Consumers get something fun to play with, and you learn where the market is going.
– ” * A | B testing = Show one visitor a green call-to-action button and another a blue one, for example. Then measure the click-through rate and how many orders or sign-ups each button generates. This tells you which placement or layout works better for your product or service.”
Starting a new website or app for your business?
Why make everything so complicated internally? And why try to build it all at once? Companies often develop dozens of platforms, but are they all really necessary? Before you know it, months or even years have gone by and your budget keeps shrinking. So how do Apple and Google manage it? Don’t just start building solutions your staff may not think they need or will never use. Ask your own people. Otherwise, you’ll be at it for years. Take stock of tasks and requirements: what information do you need, what do your employees spend most of their time on, and which tools do they use most right now?
Take logging hours, for example. You could develop an elaborate, complex system for it, but you don’t have to. Link it to the calendars on employees’ work phones, and a push notification can ask whether they want to log an appointment. The app then sends the information straight from their calendar into the time-tracking system.
Map out the process before you begin. Sketch it out, and do it together. Spend time on wireframes during development. Involving your employees is essential.
Marketing for the future
The PTT brand manual is as thick as the Van Dale, the heavyweight Dutch dictionary. It spells out in exhaustive detail how the logo may and may not be used. The future, however, lies in making logos fluid. What do we mean by fluid?
Put simply: being creative with your brand and logo. Over the years, companies like Google, HEMA, AOL, and MTV have done this brilliantly. The entire experience counts, so carry it through everywhere. These brands have listened to their customers and evolved with their expectations without losing their identity. Carry your design right into the store, the way Starbucks and Magnum do with their logo and products. When the whole brand experience comes together, people are willing to pay more for your product or service, or even line up for it.
Brands are increasingly becoming platforms where people with shared passions find each other, like the Nike running community. Nike blends its brand experience and products with consumers’ everyday lives. Create an effective, creative design that people want to be part of, and they’ll naturally share it with their networks.
– “Personally, I don’t think every brand can pull this off. Only popular brands, and those that have established themselves as market leaders, can get away with it. Without strong recognition and a rock-solid product experience, it wouldn’t work… ”
You think you see what you see, but you don’t…
Huh?!? Yes, really. This is about people’s associations and what the brain registers and connects. Different people think in different ways. When someone says CHAIR, some people picture the word and others picture the object. Some are visually oriented, others are text-oriented. That’s why your presentations should match your audience. If you’re presenting a project to a technical team, there’s no point in giving a highly visual presentation.
What your eyes see and what your brain sees can be very different. Certain shapes can trigger other associations, because your brain links these objects to emotions. This is the work of what are called mirror neurons. With cars, for example, the front end can convey an emotion.
Emotions are a powerful driver in the consumer buying process. Colors and sounds trigger associations too. Men process women’s voices less clearly because they associate them with music, so the beginning of a conversation doesn’t always fully register. Women prefer to see other women in soft or neutral colors rather than, say, red. To women, red signals aggression and dominance. To men, a red dress comes across as inviting. Your subconscious can register colors differently, because that’s what your brain thinks it sees.
Mobile is becoming the remote control for our lives
There are too many devices, and we can’t use them all together. We need to start using mobile differently. Devices are already replacing physical products: the calculator is now an app on your phone, and in the future we’ll pay with our phones too. Screens will show what’s going to happen and what needs to happen. Here’s how Microsoft sees the future:
[Microsoft’s vision of the future]
Our lives are expected to fill up with dumb screens: blank screens you can slide or swipe your own content onto. Dumb, flexible screens with smart content.
Philips introduced smart bulbs, which took away its point of contact with people in stores. But it got a lot in return. Because you control the bulbs with your phone, you interact with the brand every day. One of the last things you do before going to sleep is use Philips to switch off the lights.
Social media = high school
Japie talked about his generation. What works on social media today won’t work 20 years from now. People over 30 are on Facebook, but today’s young people see it as uncool because their parents are there. We’re the CD generation: born just before the CD was introduced, yet still familiar with its predecessor… the cassette tape.
[We’re the CD generation: Children of the 90s, according to Internet Explorer 10]
Behave the way you should have behaved in high school to be liked. Are you a nerd who builds robots? Then don’t explain how all those motherboards work. Explain how your robot can make their lives better.
Stay true to yourself, but make it fun and interesting for your followers to listen to you. That’s how you start a conversation and turn them into ambassadors. Keep it approachable and be open with your followers.
– “I have to admit I’ve heard plenty of takes on social media, but never this one! A genuinely funny way to make the point that you should stay true to yourself.”
– “It was a really fun and successful day, full of ideas for the future. It was great to hear different perspectives on much-discussed topics, and it makes you look at online projects in a new way. Look ahead and build a website that will suit your target audience five years from now. Appeal to your audience on a conscious or subconscious level, in a way that reflects who you are. The brand experience doesn’t stop online, so carry it through everything you offer, from products to services and customer care. Make them love you and they will share their enthusiasm with the world. Use the information that’s already available about your visitors, and keep testing! Thanks for the invitation, and kudos to all the speakers!”
