New Venture Development incorporates all activities associated with generating new digital business opportunities within the realm of product, service design, business model curation, and brand marketing. From its inception, a business’s digital development is the foundation on which it stands.
Identifying new digital business models in an age infatuated with innovation is the defining factor of adaptation. What’s happening in the boardroom is not necessarily what’s happening on the front lines of digital innovation. Companies need to adapt and think like startups in order to define disruptive business models and deliver game-changing products. The digital world refuses to remain static, so why should your brand?
Brands tend to be disrupted because they neglect the signals of advancement, and have become complacent about the recent success that they can present to shareholders. Companies that do see the impending innovation on the horizon are often the same ones that strike first. Since many of these companies don’t find themselves directly involved in the tech industry, neglection is all too common a fate.
When New Venture Development is prioritized for a brand, their top mistake is looking solely at digital startups as the sole threats to their (possibly) antiquated business model. For every digital startup, there’s a fellow company in the same your industry successfully undergoing this digitization process. Simply, the closer your industry is related to tech, the more competition you’ll have.
To counteract this, corporations need to track not only the digital startups but study fellow competitors and observe how they’re transitioning into the digital sector. Through our digital innovations lab, we can avoid such fallacies as “bolt-on tech” to ensure that your venture into the digital world not only forms a modernized revenue stream but fully integrates with the brand model and culture that you hold closest. New acquisitions don’t always equate to gained knowledge.
Though investment into your future through digital expansion characterizes New Venture Development, we believe human experience is the differentiating factor. Companies often attempt to restructure around this expansion, while forgetting about what brought them there, to begin with. Disrupting markets without the disruption of your organizational status quo is how #wesolvedigital.
User engagement matters. It’s the reason people come back to an application. It promotes familiarity and loyalty with a brand and product. It enhances visibility, as people share content. It’s a sign of validation, telling you that the product you produce or the way you promote it is useful.
As a products iterate, its user engagement will probably be the most important predictor of future success. This is because engaged users are the ones most committed to your product. You can count on them to try out those cool new features. All fo this, and to drive referrals, provide feedback, and evangelize your product.
Of course, quantifying user engagement is easier said than done. Even though we can all agree that user engagement is a crucial component to the success of a business, often even relatively simple ways to optimize engagement are overlooked.
Let’s start by pointing out that “engagement” is a loose term, and means different things depending on your product. For a publication, user engagement can be measured by the number of impressions. This is based on clicks, shares, likes, and other social metrics.
Whereas for an app it can be monthly active users or daily active users weighted against attrition. Investors will often ask what your KPIs are, these are often synonymous with your engagement metrics.
When defining engagement, the first step will be determining what engagement means for your specific product before you can lay out a strategy.
In today’s marketplace, there are hundreds if not thousands of competitors to your product – so the question is: what makes you stand out from the rest of them? What value do you give users that all the other guys out there don’t?
Define engagement activities and track, score, and rank them.
Next, you should define engagement activities (i.e., upvote news article, buy a content pack, watch a video, comment on a photo, and the like) to start tracking them. These activities represent the extent to which your users who engage with your product.
There are several analytical tools (for mobile apps you can use Appsee, for example) that allow you to track user behavior easily. It’s helpful to score those activities based on importance (i.e., clicking on an article is less valuable than sharing it to social feeds). Once you have each activity scored, you can rank them. Ranking will help you better understand how your users engage with your site/product while elucidating areas of improvement.