At the Figaro Digital Marketing Summit next week, digital experience and UX consultant, Shaun Miller, will be talking about how more brands should think about building digital products, rather than just a website.
Shaun is a prolific speaker and has even taken to the stage at the UK’s premier marketing event, Festival of Marketing, so we caught up with Shaun to ask him a few questions about his day-to-day work in a digital experience agency, what his talk is all about, and what visitors to the summit can expect.
Q: Can you let us know a little about your role and what you do at Codehouse?
A: I’m a digital experience consultant, which means I help our customers by taking their business strategy and working out how they can use digital channels, and in particular their website, to deliver against that strategy, whether that be to generate more leads or more sales and deliver an improved customer experience. I work together with our designers and developers to implement what’s needed for the customer, from creating personas and user journeys to facilitating personalisation and setting up tracking to ensure everything is correctly and accurately measured and we can show success.
Q: You talk is entitled “Don’t build websites. Build digital products.” We know what a website is, but what do you mean by a digital product?
A: Websites are typically about somewhat static pages of content, and this 'type' of website absolutely serves a purpose – a vital one, in fact. I’m not going to propose that brands get rid of their website, but they should look to create digital products alongside it. In fact, digital products are websites, because they exist on the web. However, a digital product is more functional, and the user has a more interactive experience, all with the aim of providing some kind of service. The most common digital product that everyone is familiar with is an ecommerce store.
Q: What’s the benefit for brands who start to think of digital products and not just their website?
A: The main thing is that they will start to deliver value to other parts of the business beyond the marketing function. For example, let’s say there’s a manufacturer whose customers make lots of payments, and these payments have traditionally been done offline in a branch, with lots of manual processes to handle any purchases made on credit. You could build a digital product to make customers’ lives easier so they wouldn’t have to go into a branch, and you could also make life easier for the internal credit team, with a lot of the checks that were previously done manually, now being automated. Any issue resolution would now be done through a digital channel rather than offline.
It requires a shift in mind-set, not skill-set, for Marketing to start thinking more about their internal customers and not just their external ones.
Q: How can brands get started?
A: It requires a shift in mind-set, not skill-set, for Marketing to start thinking more about their internal customers and not just their external ones, for the benefit of the whole business. By thinking about developing digital products, Marketing can prove more value to the business that they ever have before.
Q: When and where is the Figaro Digital Marketing Summit?
A: The Figaro Digital Marketing Summit is on Thursday 30 January at the Emirates Stadium. It looks like a great round-up of speakers for this one, so I recommend marketers get their skates on and book a ticket now or see if they qualify for a VIP ticket.
Join Codehouse at the summit and learn more
You can grab a VIP ticket to the Figaro Digital Marketing Summit for free if you’re a senior level decision-makers with purchasing authority.
If you’re planning to go to the Figaro Digital Marketing Summit next week and would like to arrange some time to chat with us about your digital product requirements or challenges, either before or after the event, we’d love to hear from you.
