Digital Evolution Over Transformation: Realising Incremental Returns Sooner And Getting The Most Out Of Tech

Too often, marketers and advertisers overspend on transforming their marketing and tech to increase brand performance without fully understanding how to properly utilise their tools at hand.

Marketers find themselves being oversold big technology that is slow to implement and even slower to deliver return on investment (ROI).

This tech often comes with the promise of some kind of ‘transformation,’ and while useful, it can leave marketers in the deep end with too much tech to properly utilise.

In the face of this problem, Klaus Germann (featured image), the national head of strategy and planning at full-service digital marketing agency Resolution Digital, and his team aim to look back towards the digital evolution and how overcoming challenges time and time again helps achieve incremental gains.

By focusing on constant cycles of optimisation with a focus on ROI, the three-time Google agency of the year award-winning team at Resolution Digital created ResoPath., a full-service user journey strategy, execution, and optimisation framework.

ResoPath., “is a framework that brings our agency approach to life across the four pillars of brand performance experience and insights to life,” according to Germann.

The process that Resolution Digital goes through is to identify, craft, and optimise its four pillar digital marketing approach for each client.

Four Pillar Approach

These four pillars are: brand, performance, experience, and insights.

Beginning with the brand, Resolution Digital elevates brands through cross-channel creative and media, establishing presence and trust at scale.

By focusing on performance, the team can understand a client’s measurable metrics at every touchpoint along the digital user journey.

The experience pillar allows Resolution Digital to build and architect high-converting, full-funnel experiences that users will love.

Finally, by leveraging a multitude of data sources to produce insights that fuel constant evolution, clients can achieve a digital evolution that keeps their businesses moving forward.

This approach stems from the agency’s analyst background, given its SEO and analytics heritage, and is centred around the notion of “Test, Learn and Iterate” to deliver incremental gains.

ResoPath. is a framework that empowers Resolution Digital to identify priorities, define initiatives and put plans in place to tackle these in order of importance to quickly realise incremental gains.

Evolutionary Trends and Evolution Enablers

Germann likened companies that had incredible technology but no way to understand or implement it, such as having a Ferrari in your garage and the keys in your hand, but no fuel in the car.

While these pillars are incredibly important for achieving digital evolution, they need to work side-by-side with what ResoPath. call ‘Evolution Enablers.’

However, the way that ResoPath. has determined these enablers is by analysing the evolutionary trends, after having worked with hundreds of clients at varying stages of digital and marketing maturity.

Without evolution enablers, and an understanding of evolutionary trends, marketers are the owner of an expensive car, but with no fuel.

So, the trends are:

• Capabilities & Experience: Sufficient resourcing, capability, and experience inside the business to do what they need to do.
• Engagement & Fame: They want to have unique, impactful, engaging, memorable, and shareable assets.
• Relevance & Understanding: Descriptive and informative experiences that fuel valued interactions, so people know what their offerings are.
• Reach & Action: Scale-up awareness through to pointed outcomes drivers.
• Tech Efficiencies & Automation: Tech adoption and use that drives optimal experiences efficiently.
• Privacy, Personalisation & Insights: Deep understandings and insights that fuel profitable futures.

And the enablers are:

• People: Does the organisation have the necessary people to realise marketing success?
• Design: Is design impactful, and does it help consumers identify and solve challenges?
• Content: Is there multi-modal content that serves the full consumer journey?
• Media: Is there a strategic media approach that engages consumers?
• Technology: Is the necessary technology in place and fully utilised?
• Data: Is there a high level of confidence that data is defined, tracked, acquired, and used efficiently?

By grasping these evolutionary trends and enablers, the agency team runs a ResoPath. workshop at the outset of working with a client. There, they understand the partnering businesses’ ambitions, goals, trends, and what they are after and provide them with a strategy on a page, a kind of “North Star,” for the business as Germann puts it.

Next up is an in-depth ResoPath. audit that ultimately leaves the client with a series of initiatives that gets clients in a healthy loop of what needs to be executed to deliver frictionless experiences.

“ResoPath. is designed at the outset, to understand how a business fares across these evolution enablers to then discern the key initiatives that should be prioritised and put them in a backlog,” Germann said of evolutionary enablers.

“What we end up doing as a product of that is having a far more agile approach to client engagement which is iterative and ongoing. Most importantly this approach sees clients realising remarkable ROI in the shortest possible timeframe.”

Industry Success

But there’s only so much explaining that can be done about how Resolution Digital’s approach and use of its ResoPath. framework works. What are the results?

Huggies is a major client for Resolution Digital and there has been huge success over the time the two businesses have worked together, based on the principles of ResoPath.

Throughout a five-year period of consistent investments in SEO, the baby care client grew their monthly website users from organic search alone.

“We started the Huggies club, where people sign up with your email address and your bub’s date of birth and gender. Because of that, we then send an EDM series,” Germann said.

“So, we actually created an EDM series that was the 42 weeks of pregnancy. Every single week, the mom would get an email saying, ‘This is what to expect this week and what’s happening.’

“It was hugely informative for us and that programme now has over 100,000 mums signed up every year.”

Another example of Resolution Digital’s approach is shown in work executed for a major tax preparation company.

The agency’s client originally wanted to re-platform its website and by applying the agencies approach they successfully redeveloped the leading tax services providers website to adopt a digital experience platform (DXP) in record time and deliver incremental gains in just 19 weeks.

Germann said that when the client wanted to overspend on an unnecessary platform, the team managed to guide them towards a simpler platform that would save the company $120,000 a year.

“It means that they’ve got $120,000 freed up to either enhance the website or allocate to paid media, and they’re even more mobilised to grow,” Germann said.

While there is pressure for advertisers and marketers to have the latest and best technology, there’s no point if it isn’t properly utilised. By understanding the tech a business has and using it to its full potential, there are not only massive potential for performance benefits but financial benefits as well.

Find out more about ResoPath., here.