User:Cheehay/sandbox

Notes:

Search terms to arrive here:

- Global Digital Estate

- Digital Estate (currently goes to digital estate planning / digital inheritance), want to redirect it to here)

- Web estate

- Global Web Estate

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The term Digital Estate refers to the collection of digital touch-points a brand uses to engage with customers.

The Digital Estate consists of both web (websites, webpages) and non-web (mobile apps, wearables, kiosks) based digital touch-points. The digital touch-points are the points of contact between the customer and the brand, and are everywhere throughout the wider customer journey. For a brand, these touch-points represent key decision-making milestones and opportunities to engagement with the customer beyond the sales cycle to the retention and advocacy stages.

Web Estate
The term Web Estate began in the early nineties and collectively refers to the web-based destinations of a brand, including corporate sites, landing pages, microsites, blogs, forums etc. It is essentially a brand’s Owned (directly generated by the brand) and Earned Media (not directly generated by the brand) on the web.

Historically, a Web Estate supports a brand’s global Web Presence. By managing and maintaining the web estate, a brand could strengthen its web presence and leverage the web as an effective marketing channel. However, the web is not the only channel within the digital world today. With the rapid transformation within the digital world, additional channels have been emerging and are proving to be essential in engaging with customers.

Now brands have to look beyond the traditional web-based channels to broaden their communication channels with their customers. As a result of this, the web estate has evolved to become a subset of the digital estate.

Managing the Digital Estate
The digital estate will require management from the brand to ensure the it is being utilized effectively in communicating with the customer. Generally within an organisation, the marketing and IT departments are the main stakeholders involved with the management of the digital estate.

It is not uncommon to find a conflict of interest between the two groups due to different personalities and culture. Marketing generally feels they are not getting what they want from IT and will use their own resources in obtaining additional channels/touch-points they feel they require to communicate with the customer. On the other hand, IT takes a more comprehensive view of the organisation and are unable to solely focus on the needs of marketing.

To successfully manage the digital estate, marketing and IT need to align on a joint vision for the customers and a focus on them. With the digital transformation, marketing can no longer ignore technology as it touches on all aspects of marketing and the customer journey. Marketing needs to understand how technology fits in and work closely with IT to manage the digital estate to achieve their marketing objectives

Marketing
Marketers focus on audience and communication. They want to better communicate with customers and to achieve this, the correct marketing channels need to be used to reach the customer with the message. The digital estate is made up of the digital touch points a marketer can use to communicate with the customer during the customer journey. Marketers manage the digital estate to ensure the channels continue to be relevant and are their best options for communication with the customer. These channels need to be readily available at short notice and relay messages at speed to ensure the window of opportunity is not missed. Marketers may frequently wish to add new alternative channels into the estate in an attempt to better engage with the customer.

IT
IT focus on the management of technology risk and encourages all parties to adopt better practices and standards. Their priority is to ensure the digital estate is stable and will take the necessary actions to enforce this. This can include preventing the proliferation of new marketing channels and technologies into the estate to minimize the technology risk. Generally, it is not uncommon for IT to operate at a slower and steadier pace than marketing to manage technology risk.

Global Digital Estate
Defined in 2015 by WPP customer experience consultancy, Cognifide, the Global Digital Estate is the digital of a global brand and will typically include channels reaching across multi-languages and/or multi-territory. In addition, each channel could be managed by different groups depending on the language and territory; creating a vast network of internal stakeholders and third-party agencies who are involved with the management of the global digital estate. As a result of this complexity, global brands often struggle to efficiently and effectively manage their global digital estate.

A poorly managed global digital estate will lead in a reduction in the brand's ability to meet the customer's demands for more meaningful engagements. Customers are demanding rich, relevant, consistent and seamless experiences during their customer journey. Customer's demands and expectations will vary from market to market. If the local marketing teams are unable to utilize the digital estate to communicate with the customer, they may resort to developing their own digital properties as an alternative channel of communication. These digital properties present a risk of a creating fragmented customer journey as the brand will have less control in maintaining a consistent branding and experience.

Brands need to be able meet these increasing demands of the customers at scale and speed. To achieve this, the global digital estate needs to be flexible and easy-to-use to enable the brands to use it to communicate with the customer. Simultaneously, brands should be able release changes across all digital channels and properties to ensure these are aligned regardless of language or territory.

(reference this to the "GlobalWeb Estate - Position Paper" when published)