Ten years ago, a strong digital strategy for an out-of-home / LBE entertainment operator was a checklist.
Did you have a nice website? Tick… Did it have e-commerce? Double tick! Your own app? An EDM solution? Social media accounts set up? Did you have this? And that?
Tick. Tick. Tick.
While the list of digital must-haves continues to grow (AI strategy? Big Data strategy?), doing it right really isn’t about the inventory of your digital “stuff” anymore.
Customers have an obnoxious habit of being individuals. They have constantly evolving, sometimes irrational, sets of practical, informational, emotional, and transactional needs as they interact with your brand.
In 2019, having a great digital strategy is increasingly about tying together your physical and digital assets into a coherent, compelling, and exciting experience.
Each asset and service operation needs to be understood in the context of how it’s going to contribute to the guest’s journey. Sometimes that means giving the guest the flexibility to satisfy their needs across multiple channels, while at other times it may be better to deliberately funnel interactions down to a single touchpoint where you know excel.
Physical & digital touchpoints also are no longer binary: the odds are your guest is also interacting with your brand digitally while they’re on location, mobile phone in hand. Or maybe, by the time this article goes to press, with a free, ad-supported, neural implant from Facebook.
Given the guest experience your operation can be substantially more or less than the sum its parts, that also raises a question of how and what to measure to gauge its success.
A decade ago, a KPI for your website might’ve been a siloed objective like “get 10,000 visitors”.
Today, it might be asking about “why do people visit my website or my social media? And how effectively did my website satisfy that need?”
Of the 1,000 people who visited your site to decide whether you’re worth their time and money for the upcoming weekend, how many concluded “yes” and how many went elsewhere? Do you have a way to measure that?
If 300 people were looking for directions and opening hours because you didn’t list information properly on Google Maps, did you achieve anything?
A framework to simplify understanding the role of each of your guest interactions is to view your offer from the perspective of the guest lifecycle. Each touchpoint represents a possibility to add to a new loyal customer or, conversely, to lose them somewhere in the process.
The guest lifecycle is also a framework to measure the ROI of each touchpoint. Will adding a mobile app to simplify on-location transactions materially increase spend per visit? Will being active responding to TripAdvisor reviews increase conversion from evaluation to visit? What would enhanced training for your in-store CSR’s do for your repeat visit metrics?
The odds are you’ll never work out where to best invest in improving the customer journey if you’re comparing metrics of 10,000 web visitors to a cashier’s guest feedback rating of 4.1 out of 5.0, to 300 Instagram shares, to your new Virtual Reality attraction having 2,000 players in a week.
By understanding pre-visit (customer acquisition) and post-visit (customer retention) as multiplicative factors on per-visit spend, it becomes possible to design a common set of KPI’s to measure the efficacy of both physical & digital touch points. Each step of the customer lifecycle yields either a positive or negative result, which a unified set of physical-digital KPI should strive to measure.
Your operations’ digital and physical touchpoints are all part of the same guest journey. And to deliver something exceptional, they need to add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Sibyl Entertainment is a boutique strategic advisory for the entertainment & technology industries. Feel free to reach out to us at sales@SibylEntertainment.com to say hello and explore how we can help.
