self reflection
Is your Digital Stack Fractured?
Good design adds value faster than it does cost, right?
But has poor design or execution of your digital strategy stopped your business from achieving its goals?
When is your Digital Stack Fractured?
A fractured digital stack occurs when there has been half-baked implementations of popular stack tools and you are leaking leads and conversions. This happens often in DIY situations. You’ll see poor attempts at creating sales funnels and often major problems with the foundation of the website.
Why does it matter? If the delivery of your sales process is fractured, it can affect conversions as people think that you may deliver your actual product in such a fractured way.
From our experience, up to 8/10 businesses suffer from fractured digital strategies and stacks.
Maybe it’s better asking, ‘when isn’t it fractured?’ or ‘by how much is it fractured?’.
99% of the time this occurs when the strategy and stack has been done with little expertise. When asked, many responsible say that they can’t afford to pay anyone to do it. The reality is that you can get this expertise for about the cost of a mobile phone plan!
Common symptoms of a Fractured Digital Stack
It’s burning you out
You know there has to be a better way because right now keeping up with everything that needs doing seems way too hard.
You spend time with online learning and everything is starting to sound the same yet results don’t meet your expectation.
Low ROI
You are hesitant to increase your marketing spend as it hasn’t really impressed you so far with the returns.
What started out as exciting is now tedius and the results reflect this.
Drowning in data
Analysing data is like pulling teeth for most business owners. This is often THE major reason why a digital stack is fractured.
Rather than just giving up, you should be using the data as a hose to manipulate the stack to make it better.
Common Causes
The following causes of fractured digital stacks just never seem to go away.
We see people making the following mistakes:
Assuming there are no assumptions
Markets, consumers and trends change. What used to work doesn’t always. Your digital strategy is a constant process of making assumptions about your target market and setting things up to prove these assumptions right or wrong.
Not enough experience
Wanting to DIY your Digital Strategy & Stack is an OK strategy (but we’re not a fan of it for websites) if you keep up with pace and have a good mentor to lean on. Inexperience can also lead to wild expectations that end in burn out. Some months you may be too busy or tired and drop the marketing ball. So not ensuring you have access to an expert to mentor or do it for you is one easy mistake to make.
Not tracking everything
With data you can make confident decisions about your business. So often we see little or no tracking of every Call To Action (CTA) , poorly segmented lists or even an outright aversion to stats. Often only one metric is tracked, like actual sales, or total visitors.
This is one main reason why all the work starts after you launch a site, because before then you have no data, just lots of assumptions.
Not knowing what you don't know
Fracturing can often occur invisibly. Is your mailing list signup form failing in IE? Are you leaking hot leads without realising it? Are your many sales funnels not optimised to your buyer personas resulting in mixed messages and a sterile experience for many? Not having a robust process for iterating on your strategy, which learns and gets better with time, is a sure fire way to be stay oblivious to what’s working and what isn’t.
No Strategy
This is where businesses know they need a website, email and maybe, just maybe a mailing list. Then that’s it. No strategy, no regular content or advertising spend is implemented. Or what is implemented is ad hoc and not documented, measured or iterated on.
No Real Commitment
Designing, building and maintaining a digital stack needs real commitment from everyone involved in leading your business.
Fracturing of your digital stack is ensured if your commitment to your stack isn’t serious enough.
It takes a minimum level of your time and money to make it really crank.
Are you committed?
All Our digital stacks
are designed from the ground up
With digital agencies in mind
Your digital marketer will love our stacks.
If you're just starting out, then locking in a great digital stack now will put your fledgling business in the best position to succeed.
(did you get that? ‘Fledgling’…. ‘Suck Seed’).
The Solution
No matter if you are just starting out, or already established, the answer is quite simple:
Partner with experience.
It may be more affordable than you think.
By partnering with BottledCode for a low monthly fee, you can get an entire digital strategy stack designed, deployed and iterated on for you with our Digital Stack Packs.
These packs have everything your business needs to thrive in the modern digital era and is backed by 20 years and hundred of digital stacks.
Creating A Custom Digital Stack
At BottledCode, our experience and systems ensure that your digital stack is as water tight as possible.
Some of our techniques include;
- Use an iterative, Target Persona driven design process which also matches Call To Actions (CTA’s) to audience’s buying ‘temperature’
- Record everything using tracking codes
- Make lots of assumptions and prove everything using data
- Using extensive ‘smoke test’ strategies to ensure all deployments of your stack work after any change
- Utilise Google Analytics to its full potential
- Mentor you in a 1-on-1, personalised way and augment your knowledge toolkit.
- Take ownership of your digital strategy & stack
- And lots lots more that we can’t give away here
.
spend more time delivering value to your customers not A/B Testing your inbound marketing
About the Author: Brad Jeffery
Chief Bottler - BottledCode
Brad is the Founder of BottledCode. He is also the Founder of IdeasKicker.com and is the inventor of the term Crowd Vetting. In 2005 he co-founded RealXstream.com, a video streaming service for the extreme sports industry and in 2014 was a senior tech lead on the largest FinTech project in the Southern Hemisphere. He also spends his time running multiple e-commerce sites as well as the owner of Made in the Gong, a makerspace. Over the last 20 years he has built hundreds of websites, apps, middleware, plugins and services and has a passion for marketing & developing automated business processes through software.