Krystal Pratt is an award-winning designer and creative director with over 15 years experience. As Director of Branding + Media at Spring Hills, she enhanced the use of digitally interactive media for sales enablement. She is a 2022 GDUSA Person to Watch.
The world has been going more digital for years but, in the height of the pandemic designers were tasked to accelerate a re-imagined digital world.
With social distancing as the norm and travel becoming challenging due to restrictions, sales had to figure out a way to not only sell but, stand out while not being directly in front of their customer.
Selling has become less product or service based and more experience centric and customer service focused. In a time where we have realized how precious life is, we have recognized the importance of an experience versus a ‘thing’ and the quality of how something makes us ‘feel’ versus just a product in our hands.
How Do You Create An Experience Virtually
The idea was to take the current digital platform and curated material and convert it all into a more immersive and interactive experience. What we created was essentially a macro website easily navigated on the go on all digital devices, providing not only our printed material digitally but, taking it a step farther and adding extra content our customer wouldn’t normally see with a flat design. We developed a 360 content rich experience linking directly back to additional resources such as specific website pages, social media posts, and video content, making the user experience, more of an adventure with an easy way contact us and to find local communities effortlessly.
By giving the user access to click around with ease on things that interest them, or on a specific topic they are choosing to learn about you are creating a personalized experience with minimal effort. Managing a society looking for instant gratification, this technique helps to provide answers to common questions a customer might have, without having to await a call back. The overall experience comes in the way of choices; click around, learn, and contact at the speed in which the user desires.
Why Digitally Interactive Brochure/Magazine vs. Website
Websites are created to showcase a company as a whole and provide an overview of information on various subjects that the company supports. Creating a digitally interactive piece of media allows more focus on a certain topic or service while telling a cohesive story without the need of searching for it.
For those looking for supporting metrics, utilizing digitally interactive media in conjunction with a digital tracking tool, companies and sales associates can have more access to a more comprehensive set of metrics that shows specific pages being viewed, for how long and what links their customers are clicking on, alerting sales professionals instantly so they can better cater to the needs of the user at the time the user is having the experience by being available to provide support and documents only pertaining to what the customer is most interested in. Digital assets like this enhances the personalized experience for better conversions.
Digital assets have limitless uses, such as brochures and presentations for consumers or sales training tools, just to name a few. The beauty of this media is it can be designed in any size format and made as complex or simple as desired. Media rich, digital assets provide a 100% customized experience for the company as well as the users, a true differentiator in the market, completely unique and on brand.
How We Did It
There are a number of different tools and ways to create digitally interactive media. There is no right or wrong way to do it, it just comes down to preference. Looking to transition existing print material into a digital format, we opted to use InDesign which is where current company brochure designs were created.
InDesign allows the designer many options to create interactive features such as roll overs, pop ups, page jumps, linking out and embedding videos to just name a few. Additionally, it has some animated features too, giving content a little extra flare.
One of the features I love most is the live editing. In a day and age where information can update so quickly, it’s crucial to have a feature where I can quickly update, add or remove things and press a single ‘publish’ button for any user that has ever received this digitally interactive media to see the updated material in real time. There is no need to resend information because a brochure will no longer be outdated. The same link will update forever. This cuts down on needing to alert everyone of updated material or potentially confusing customers with which is the correct version. Human error is a real thing, so if incorrect data is published, a designer can quickly update it without having to alert everyone of the indiscretion, protecting your company’s reputation.
Conclusion
Deploying this in a healthcare setting using digitally interactive media in conjunction with a digital tracking tool we found was a huge success on many levels.
Healthcare marketing material requires a particular balance between providing information to educate the customer in an easy, concise way. The goal is to not overwhelm the average person with unfamiliar healthcare terminology and provide information in such a way that the general consumer could easily digest and understand.
We were able to do this by keeping pages shorter and to a single point, allowing people to click to another page if they wanted to learn more. We also supported this by adding access to additional material on the subject matter with supporting flyers and videos. The user had choice in deciding how in depth they wanted to go.
Previously, we were digitally giving prospective clients access to a flyer or simple brochure – the same type of flyer or brochure provided by many competitive companies, so this new format immediately set us apart from the competition.
We are now strategically choosing which materials should be converted into a digitally interactive media pieces while continuously adding on interactive features to keep it interesting and exciting for the sales team presenting the material and for the customers viewing it.
The use of digitally interactive sales material creates not only a pandemic proof sales process but a more immersive experience for the future of design.
Examples of Digitally Interactive Brochures for Reference
https://indd.adobe.com/view/a1cb791c-f10b-40a2-9537-50455dbe78e8
https://indd.adobe.com/view/76542652-d461-4e51-9bfe-4d76ad8ddee6
