Written by: Amala
If there’s one thing we know for a fact. It’s that nobody could have predicted what the pandemic accelerated and mitigated. Oftentimes, in publishing, we depend on certain assumptions and observations to build growth strategies. The term “transformation” has been thrown around enough. What it stands for is change, not just any change but relevant, progressive change.
Work styles around the world have changed. We’ve gone from taking a public commute every day to working from remote locations to ensure a work-life balance. This has also helped hire more talent without any restrictions. But how does this affect transformation? Your workflow will directly impact your digital transformation. This would mean that you must adopt platforms that support remote work. The technology you hire must enable effective workflow with a structured interface, it must also be mobile-friendly. Getting your back-end right is the first step to digital transformation.
Today’s empowered customers need a rapid response to their queries. It starts with a focus on user insights. You must have forces in place to understand your users better, this could be through feedback or membership. This could help you lead with facts rather than intuition. It also needs to be more targeted rather than a generic performance survey. Things user’s can give you honest feedback on -
Site performance
Look and Feel your website/app
Content quality
Relevance
Accessibility
Personalization
Understanding user experience could mean having an overall idea, having individual data, and knowing how they would each like their experience to be made better.
With Google laying out their web core vital metrics in 2021, publishers have been trying to get their sites to perform well to rank higher. As we move from 4G to 5G networks, publishers must look into the AMP and core vitals of their pages. This will not only help with ranks but also further enhance the user experience. With each drag across a screen, users are used to getting a refreshed feed - this is the new expectation. Can your site keep up?
Avoid becoming a digital prey and prioritize the speed of your site. It’s important to not think linearly - your content needs to reach your readers quickly across platforms. This is the case with websites, apps, podcasts, and more! Any lag would simply drive traffic away. This is a challenge for most legacy publishers. Updating your platform, and reducing the clutter on your website can help improve the overall loading time of your content enabling users to interact quickly with your content.
There are many conversations about how AI will increasingly become more relevant with time. Although it can never overpower the human output it is meant to make analysis easier. AI can be adapted across various fields such as - monetization, user behavior, automating payments, engagement, and more!
Sensing - inputs such as text, voice or image search, or data triggers from systems can be sensed through AI.
Comprehension of components that need to be dissected to know the meaning, to then convert into bite-sized data.
Analyze data in order to understand or take action based on a set of data.
Digital publishers must address the expanding landscape and complexity of managing hybrid clouds, multi-cloud architectures, and micro services. Publishers can invest in building new apps, and growing data faster with new content management platforms to distribute across channels. The apps, integrations, and data clusters are more focused which helps publishers to expect high service level objectives. It also enables an increase in automation from IT Ops supporting the tech.
Your tech team should leverage machine learning around monitoring tools and observable data. You can use micro services to aggregate data, correlate alerts, and identify trends and errors.