Right now, a need to differentiate and capture first-party data is revitalizing the potential of the web experience. In my new role with the Jam3 team, we focus on combining insight, creativity and technology to align with culture and connect with people. Because websites have become the primary sales support and source of information for audiences once again, they must also pull their weight in building deeper connections with audiences. Yet many designers and development teams are focused on ticking every best practice off the list, resulting in websites that end up looking and feeling the same, lacking the unique spark needed to make an indelible impression with audiences. 

We need to raise the standards and expectations on what a website can achieve—so I say rip up the rulebook and trade best practices for bespoke, premium solutions that forge deeper connections with audiences and immerse them within the world of the brand.

Set Your Brand in Motion—Literally

There’s a saying we like to use: the interface is the brand. It means every experience across the digital ecosystem becomes a direct reflection of its core products and services. So when we set out to build an immersive web experience, we begin by examining the essence of the brand and how to communicate that through a series of moments. What is the emotion we want to trigger with visitors? Building a uniquely differentiated platform starts with defining what you want audiences to feel at every step.

This is where conventional wisdom to stick to standard best practices falls flat. Limiting your website interface to static text and images does little to bring brand moments to life. Interactive elements in particular—think real-time rendering and explorable 3D product models, or even full games themselves—enable user journeys that feel premium and personalized, but even little touches in motion design go far beyond user expectation.

Form Meets Function

Elements like those described above aren’t just for looking good; they can also help translate abstract concepts into tangible, memorable experiences. Product demonstrations are a great example of this. With 3D interactive models, you can break apart a product to explain its various pieces, like an exploded-view diagram.

This was our approach to building a strong online identity for Lucid Motors, creators of the most luxurious electric cars on the market. We built the user journey around motion visuals and CGI assets that were animated to perfectly highlight key features of the automaker’s technology, including components of the chassis and the battery pack that powers it all.

The scalable platform is also lightning fast. This is an important consideration that can’t be overlooked: when you have resource-intensive, motion-heavy assets and animation, your team must ensure the experience doesn’t slow down and freeze up—especially for those on mobile devices. What’s the highest performance, most flexible way of representing the brand? This is a critical question but one that most production studios skimp out on, sacrificing performance for flashy visuals. But the fluidity of moving through a platform contributes just as much, if not more, to the experience than visual fidelity alone.

Building Effective Experiences

With the rise of the immersive web, much of the work that was once restricted to microsites has made its way onto brand platforms and commerce. Which means truly standing out requires a totally different set of skills than many teams may be accustomed to. Realizing the market need for experiences built upon a foundation of data-driven and strategic insights, we’re scaling up our own capabilities within the Media.Monks team to defy convention and create work that breaks new ground.

What we do is highly specialist—and that can make it tough to find the finest talent in-house to support brands’ growing ambitions. To combat this lack of talent, we recently launched a six-months paid immersive web traineeship to cultivate a pool of specialist creative web developers who have instilled our values and pursuit of perfection from the start.

This means tackling historic challenges like measuring the value of touchpoints like microsites. In the early aughts (when the microsite was king), they lacked the analytics to understand if their million-dollar investments were worth it. The present-day focus on conveying the feeling of a brand may not be as concrete as selling X amount of product, but it’s no longer immeasurable.

The ultimate goal is to forge a connection and relationship with audiences. While today’s immersive web thrives from CMOs willing to take creative risks to build something special, there’s opportunity to bridge together creative UX design, strategy and analytics to eliminate risk and enhance the brand—even without relying on best practices that have sucked the feeling out of the everyday digital experience.

With Wajer Yachts, for example, we used the website to transport visitors to the exact moment of casting off with a yacht in a single click. 360-degree product views and gorgeous imagery of the yachts’ interiors offered a vivid experience and a sensation of ownership. But it didn’t just look good: time spent on the website increased by 250% after launch and generated qualified leads increased by 450%, demonstrating the value of bespoke branded experiences.

The internet in its current form is closing to its end. A new era of immersive, personalized experiences is emerging, as evidenced in recent discussion around the metaverse. As brands aim to build relationships with consumers through bespoke touchpoints, the role of web experiences—enhanced by immersive web technology—has elevated to become an essential space to differentiate the brand and translate it into compelling experiences.

The discussion featured leadership from both regional and world-leading brands, who each discussed their unique relationships with data. From building a more holistic understanding of the customer journey to enabling more impactful personalization and experiences and more, each speaker across four segments revealed their success stories in activating data. You can watch the full event here, or find key insights from speakers below.

Data-Driven Marketing Should Enhance the Customer Experience

It’s easy to feel lost with acclimating to recent (or upcoming) changes in privacy and data collection. As marketers navigate a privacy landscape transformed by new features in iOS 14, the cookie apocalypse and more, a good rule of thumb is to focus your data-driven marketing strategy on enhancing the customer experience.

“The goal is to take as much data as you can that makes your experience better and helps you truly understand the customer,” says Erin Levzow, Vice President of Marketing Technology at Del Taco Restaurants. She opened her fireside chat by drawing a distinction between what kinds of experiences make personalization more meaningful in the minds of consumers versus strategies like relentless retargeting that simply creep people out. “When it’s done well, that’s great—but when a brand knows I just bought an end table and offers me another end table, it doesn’t feel very personalized.”

By zeroing in on value for the customer instead, brands set themselves up to capture the first-party data that is so crucial to building relationships with consumers today. “One thing we've benefitted from around the strength of our loyalty program is that so many of our customers are willing to uniquely identify themselves across channels to take advantage of our benefits,” says Holly Waisanen-Hatipoglu, Vice President of Loyalty Performance Management at Marriott International. “That's made it easier for us to at a minimum have some kind of customer ID that goes across multiple platforms.”

A customer-centric focus can also help unpack which metrics hold value to your brand and how to interpret them. Levzow detailed how for a quick-service restaurant like Del Taco, a lot of time spent on the website isn’t the good signal it may mean for other businesses. “Customers are looking for information fast—what on my website do I want them to spend time doing?” she says. “They’re looking for things like nearby locations, so if they’re spending a lot of time on the website, then I should be concerned. We absolutely look at numbers differently.”

Take a Holistic Approach to Measuring Across the Customer Journey

A recurring topic of conversation throughout the day was the role that data plays in reaching audiences where they’re at, then using those insights to accurately pinpoint where you should invest your spend. Chris Marino, Global Head of Performance Marketing & Media at Bloomberg Media, drew on his experience of driving consumer subscriptions—a process that entails reaching audiences offsite, whether through social, search, OTT media and more.

“I’m very passionate about making the right levels of investment in upper and mid-funnel marketing initiatives, knowing that that’s where the opportunity and scale really exists to drive consideration—then ultimately using that scale, content and insights to bring someone down the funnel and drive a really efficient conversion,” says Marino. Subscriptions to Bloomberg Media grew by 34% in the first half of the year, reaching more than 325,000.

Advocating for building a more holistic understanding of the customer journey, Marino cautioned against taking a last-touchpoint approach to measurement. When it comes to assessing media spend, for example, your Google Analytics reporting may give a lot of credit to the role your website plays in driving conversions. But basing decisions on that information alone loses sight of the influences that consumers have engaged with on the path to get there.

“If it takes them five or more touchpoints to become a paid subscriber, if we were to only think about things on a last-touch basis, we might limit investments that bring customers through the funnel,” Marino says. So, how do you get out of that last-touch mindset? “Stop thinking about channel attribution and what we as an individual have contributed and start thinking about how we as marketers all come together to create the most optimal customer experience,” he says.

Align Data and Content Creation for Marketing at Scale

Of course, data plays an important role in identifying and understanding new user behaviors. Canva, a platform that makes it easy to design graphics, presentations, documents and more, saw a large uptick in adoption from educators last year as learning migrated online. Noticing this trend, the Canva team designed templates to help teachers quickly and easily design their own worksheets.

While it’s clear data can signal the need for new product features, that same user data generated in the platform can also inform marketing content to further fuel growth. "Marketing is on the front lines of testing and learning about customers,” says Sunil Subhedar, Global Head of Growth at Canva.

He spoke on the importance of having an AI-based recommendation engine built into digital products, noting that the very same technology can power marketing performance. When users begin a new project on Canva, for example, they’re met with popular templates to get started. Canva depicts these same popular templates in marketing materials, which show prospective users what others are building through the platform’s ease of use.

While this approach is effective, many brands will rely on a skilled partner to execute at scale. “To scale the amount of content would require an army of people,” says Subhedar. “So there is an opportunity to partner with an agency to build this complementary service and fuel global creative using a template brand toolkit and a way of disseminating that across different languages and markets.” It’s a challenge that we enjoy, weaving data insights and production together to power marketing at speed and scale for audiences all over the world.

There’s lots of ways you can use data to power marketing and performance. Whether it’s better understanding segments of your audiences and their needs, gaining a 360-degree view of the customer decision journey or integrating artificial intelligence into the creative process, data-driven marketing at scale doesn’t have to be the scary prospect that it may seem. In fact, heeding the advice shared during the Brand Innovators event is an excellent way of preparing yourself ahead of time for new policies and shifting consumer attitudes toward privacy—and that’s an insight you can count on.