10 Key Considerations for Digital Businesses Success in 2015

The current digital age is a boon for businesses wanting to operate across boarders and way beyond any localized or temporal restrictions. With increased opportunities though comes more inherent complexity, and a greater need to wrangle some sort of competitive advantage over a much larger competitive field. The following 10 points are core to our own Affino philosophy in how best to deliver a successful business.

Mobile First Approach - As Pew Research reports, people glance at their phones an average of 100 times per day, it is the one device you can guarantee people will always have to hand - it makes total sense therefore that you should choose to maximise returns from that contact potential

Responsive Design - In line with the above point, people are increasingly accessing content, media and services via their smartphones. There is no way consumers will download an app for every single retailer or service they use, so you need to rely on a slick responsive-designed business interface which can provide a consistently brilliant interface to your consumers - across every platform / touchpoint

Single Customer View / Journey / Omnichannel - this very much dovetails with Responsive Design - which is about providing a superior and seamless journey across different devices and locations, a great example of this is Netflix, where you can start watching a film on your smartphone, then switch up and watch some more on your tablet, then desktop, and finally finish off the last 30 minutes on your Hi-Def big-screen TV

Content Filtering - Instead of extensive menu panels leading to different content silos, you publish single streams / feeds of content where the readers can filter down to their desired content by activating selective keyword filters

Concinnity - the harmonious bringing together of different parts, often used to describe deep, multi-channel, integrated marketing campaigns, we at Affino apply this to the bringing together of different business units / divisions into a single unified experience / interface

Digest - the contemporary world of media is dominated by soundbites and short-form content, you need to be able to serve up easily digested highlights where your consumers can absorb what they need in just a few minutes

Automation - there is a lot of talk about Sales and Marketing Automation, but this goes one step further into business process automation. By running your key business activities through your digital business platform, you gain enormously in how you can combine, synergise, streamline and automate your everyday essential business protocols

Monetisation - a great part of the purpose of Concinnity and Automation etc. is to open up additional sources of revenue, to add value and provide premium and enhanced services where automation and empowerment allows your business community to service itself to a high degree

Business Management - this goes beyond driving the various commercial ventures through your digital business platform, to managing key business processes through said platform - areas like human resources, communications, project management, billing, payroll, suppliers etc.

Edge - what’s your differential advantage and how do you communicate it? With the increasingly international marketplace you operate in, you need a really strong brand, combined with easily communicable benefits, all backed up by exceptional customer engagement and experience