Your digital marketing strategy needs a boost? Discover five methods SKEMA Executive MBA students use to energize and rethink their marketing initiatives by leveraging a user-centric approach.

In this webinar recording, Jean-François Detout, who teaches a Strategy and Digital Marketing course for SKEMA’s Global Executive MBA program, goes through the five key steps towards building an effective digital marketing strategy. Jean-François is also director of the Manager Marketing Data & e-Commerce specialized Master’s at SKEMA.  

Defining a user-centric strategy

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in the 1990s, he declared that he wanted to build the most user-centric company in the world. One of his goals was to empower the user to easily shop online without having to call anyone for help. That was a novel  idea back then.  

Today, Global EMBA students at SKEMA learn, among many other things, how to transform a website into something more autonomous. Jean-François gives a few examples of projects created by GEMBA participants focused on a friction-free customer journey.

Using the ZMOT strategy

So, how do they create these projects? For example, the students used the so-called ZMOT model that explains the discovery and awareness stage of the customer journey, when the consumer investigates a product before making the final purchase decision and without the knowledge of the seller. ZMOT, an acronym for Zero Moment of Truth, is fed by other people’s experience and feedback.

To improve the user experience, brands need to collect data and control what is being said on their platforms. That’s why GEMBA participants learn how to define a SEO-friendly strategy, assess the ZMOT process and optimize it.

Focusing on speed

At the beginning of the century, Google considered content as the most important aspect of a website. However, over the last few years the focus has shifted to speed, Jean-François said. Most recently, Google launched the Core Web Vitals initiative to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. Google and other providers have launched a number of tools to help measure and report on performance. GEMBA participants learn to use some of these tools so they can improve user experience and make faster websites.

Reducing your carbon print

Managers need to make strategic decisions for their companies considering many factors, including the ecological aspect. Jean-François cited a study according to which the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions. GEMBA students learn about the carbon footprint of their websites and how to improve it.

OKR

OKRs stand for objectives and key results, a goal-setting methodology that can help a team set and track measurable goals. This framework pairs the objectives managers want to achieve with the key results they will use to measure progress—so goals are tied to the team’s day-to-day work. OKRs are used a lot in digital projects. Jean-François presented the anatomy of the OKR framework, which is based on three questions:

Where do I need to go?

How do I know I’m getting there?

What will I do to get there?

 

Watch the full webinar for more insights, including GEMBA student and sales manager Naoufel Abdelwahed who presents his “Hybrid Sales in B2B” project using the user-centric approach.