Turn Your Website Into a Hub for Engaging Experiences

In the digital age, companies are learning fast that meeting customer expectations and driving business outcomes go beyond brand recognition or product availability.

Bryan Cheung

CEO, Liferay, Inc.

In the digital age, companies are learning fast that meeting customer expectations and driving business outcomes go beyond brand recognition or product availability.

Managing digital expectations may seem daunting; however, it's clear that companies that understand their buyers and create consistent experiences across channels will more successfully attract, engage, and retain customers.

In light of this, we asked Bryan Cheung to share his thoughts on the digital consumer, data-driven marketing, and building better web experiences.

Q. How do you customize a web experience for today's digital consumers whose backgrounds and interests vary?

BRYAN CHEUNG: Today’s customers expect to be addressed “Audience of One”: they want to be the center of your digital attention. Personas, segments, and rules are a great start but the ultimate goal is to understand each person’s need at any given moment.

People interacting digitally tend to be more transactional and purpose-driven than in traditional marketing, which means less browsing and more doing. They’re looking for specific information, educating themselves about you and your competitors, or gaining understanding of a problem. It’s important to create continuity across channels: if someone is trying to execute a transaction on a mobile app, then switches to your website, do you let them continue where they left off?

Lastly, using digital tools and technology help tailor their experience. By looking at their search terms, click behavior, and level of engagement—how long they stay with you—you can figure out what they’re looking for and deliver exactly what they need.

Q. It sounds like you’re talking about the Buyer’s Journey. Do you take that into account when creating web content?

BC: Yes, the Buyer’s Journey is a concept that we use to help understand the path a lead takes on his/her way to becoming a customer, partner, advocate, star employee or some other role that’s important to your organization. Of course, there’s no single journey for everyone, and buyers tend to jump all over the place. However, modeling the journey can still help you accelerate the development of the customer’s relationship with your organization.

Then, the short answer is this: it helps to write your content with the Buyer in mind. They’re not going to want to hear about competitors or detailed technical specs in the beginning when it’s important to show empathy for their problems rather than the superiority of your solution. Later, as you build trust and credibility, you can be more confident and assertive in presenting your products.

Your site should also be designed to be flexible and dynamic, so that the most appropriate content for what the users need can be presented on any visit. The front page isn’t the single entry point for visitors; they’re going to find most content on your site through searches and social referrals.

Q. Data has been called the new oil. Where do you begin in knowing what to measure?

BC: At Liferay, we try to identify the inflection points that make the biggest impact on Buyer Journey acceleration. We start with a theory on which digital touchpoints indicate readiness to engage at the next stage; there might be one key touchpoint or several that work in tandem. Once we’ve run the model for a long enough period that covers the sales cycle, we test our assumptions and see whether those inflection points were indeed influential.

Sometimes your data gives you very obvious conclusions, but it’s usually more nuanced than that and requires deliberate and prolonged attention. You should hire dedicated data analysts and give them enough leeway to find the insights in your data.

Q. Tell us about the roadmap for mobile content and design.

BC: We’ve been building a lot of exciting mobile-related capabilities into Liferay, including adding targeted content to native mobile apps and supporting mobile push notifications. We work with the worldview that digital platforms are inherently omni-channel. Users are going to start their journey on the web or mobile but quickly switch to in-store or phone-based interactions before completing their journey, for example, on a tablet or at a digital kiosk. So Liferay is trying to make it easy to connect those dots together into a unified journey.

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We'll discuss these challenges in depth as well as topics on mobile strategy, integration, and collaboration at the Liferay Symposium. There's no better time or opportunity to get to know the Liferay team, key clients, and strategic partners than in Chicago this November.