Maria (Boux) Morganti Avatar

The Diary of a digital Journey

Tag: Marketing

  • Digital should be for everyone, hence how to make the complex easy

    Now more than ever, with the fast development of technology and the increase of complex software/cloud solutions, it is becoming more and more difficult to understand what a product does or what is exactly its new function. If we think about an old Mobile Phone, the old-fashioned NOKIA to understand, the only ability was to make/receive calls.

    Afterwards it was made able to send SMS’s, play simple games and memorized telephone numbers. After a while it came the possibility to send/receive emails (I still miss my old Blackberry…for Boomer like me that remains still the very best Smartphones for professional use). But that for many people was already somehow very complicated to manage.

    If we look at the Smartphones now there is nothing we can’t do anymore! From E-Mails, Games, Apps of all kind, steps measurements, navigators and much more. But not only that: security passwords with finger scanning or eye/voice recognition, localisation, mobile payments and many other functions. Are all of this making our life simpler? Well in my opinion, it depends. When we understand how these new functionalities work, of course. But is everyone able to learn that quickly? Not really.

    How many of us spent hours to understand how to set the iPhone new mode connected to Cloud. And the synchronization? New Updates? Privacy settings in Social Media? New functionalities? Of course there are lot of people who will say that was easy and actually took 5 minutes…Well I am sure there are also many who agrees with me that it didn’t take 5 Minutes and could have been much easier if was better explained.

    That is the message of my post today. Makes things complicated, easy, it’s not exactly an „easy“ job. All the way through the digital journey it has always been my prerogative to simply all around the digital experience and functionalities, in order to make it possible for everyone to work with them. Technology is meaningless if not understood and ultimately used. And too many times I experienced cool features and really helpful tools that might have really made an impact in a certain process or within a department, if only it was used. And I can’t blame the users for not doing it. When the strength to learn something new is higher than its benefit, it will simply not been done.

    „I don’t understand anything here. It’s just too technical“ – how many times have we heard this? And if they don’t say it, believe me they think it. And it’s not about being lazy here, it’s really about prioritizing. Between all daily activities it is human to choose the ones who bring more benefit with less effort and something difficult to understand and very detailed is not less effort, is a huge effort.

    It is very hard to have in the same mindset the ability to concentrate and deep think about complex schemes and in the same time visualizing the idea of the result in a way that other people see the benefit and the advantages, without all the processes behind.

    Generally speaking, digital experts, similarly with their IT peers, are „their products”, meaning they know all details and are so deeply immersed in it, that they might not remember the final benefit for the end user anymore, or better they know it but at some point it’s for them become „assumed“. This is why it is for them very difficult to explain again and again what are the benefits for their users and more importantly how to get them.

    5 Tipps for a “simple” digital mind-set

    1. Tell and show ONLY what the users NEEDS to see, adapting it according to the target. There is not need to explain the backend of a system or very complex processes through the various tools and channels. Just explain the function and the simple steps to archive it.
    2. Using very simple words. Not everyone knows what is an IP-Adresse or the meaning of RAM or ai. Yes, for the IT people it’s obvious, but in any decision process there will be more than IT involved. Please keep it very child-simple, to the extreme of using word like „memory“ or Database. It might not be 100% accurate but the users understands it.
    3. SEO likes simplicity. Being found in Google is something that every company can’t avoid anymore, and how are the search made? With complex words or very difficult expressions? Even the most expert person in their business will start looking for a simple key-work in their Google search, think about it.
    4. From simple – > complex is always possible, the other way around not. My advice? Start always from the very first and most intuitive benefit and effect of your program/solution and from there start going more and more in details.
    5. Mental associations. The ability here is to compel good product stories, appropriate analogies and memorable metaphors so that the end user immediately knows what the solutions does and wants to know more. The users wants to know and capture at maximum within the least amount of time. In Marketing Material, this translates into a demand for the most useful information in the minimum amount time.

  • The start of the Journey

    To often as a marketing managers I was bombarded from content about how to digitize the marketing activities, how to relaunch the website, the best practices in lead generation and now of course how to best integrate ai in our work.

    Well what I never read anywhere is to actually do all these things in companies, in the real workplace within the real Environment. I guess because most of all this content has been written from agencies or consultants, who have the time to produce it and who is also paid to do it, who basically is “forced” to produce such content.

    Professional in companies don’t have neither the time or the need to write “guide” or educational content to help other peers in the same situation. They already struggle enough in their own one, let alone communicate what they have been through in any kind of form.

    This is why I decided to start a diary in this journey, which I am embracing right now in the company that I am working on.

    Following are my propositions:

    • Document every steps: so that I’ll able to recall the decisions making process, especially important if in the long run not successful
    • Clarify my thoughts: when you put things in writing, you are forced to think through
    • Weekly update: I want to post something every week because consistency is necessary to be effective
    • Stay neutral: it is not about the company or the team, it is about what I want to archive and how

    The intention is to use this as tool for myself as well as heritage of this journey.

    When I started with this company I brought with me the proposition of digizing the marketing acitivities and being able to measure and track all marketing activities in order to analyze them and make data-drive decisisions.

    What I realize this is much more than just “marketing” or “communication”. The transofrmation should start in the processes first. How we collect the leads should come after we define what is a lead and what parameters define it.

    And to be able to understand that, there is much more to know and find-out inside an organisation, that goas beyond the department of marketing or sales or any other department.

    This is why I want to write down the process, the phases and the stages, because I know there are times where you feel like you are not moving, you are not making any progress and it is all for nothing. Yet in those moments I will look back at these pages and remind myself, yes we are moving and yes things are changing, don’t give up.