The importance of customer experience can't be undersold. And while we ponder customer experience with given elements of the digital package, the focus must move wider to a view of the full customer journey.

What is the goal of the outbound media? What is the action that best fits each digital approach? What is the web site supposed to accomplish?

Considering the journey allows you to pinpoint the critical moments where you need to focus your attention. Ryan Lunka of nChannel encourages everyone to think in audience probabilities. Once X happens, what's the next likely action or decision they could make. Then the next, and the next. Give them those next options rather than forcing them to hunt.

This sounds so simple but the work needs to be done or one good experience will be followed by a bad one. And the journey will end in a disgruntled bounce rather than a deepening relationship or sale.

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PROGRAMMATIC: AdEx is launching a programmatic experience that (among other things) stores personalized data on the browser to lessen privacy issues while maintaining targeting ability. The process may also speed up the delivery (by microseconds) but that part isn't noted here. MORE ... What does the investor sector think of the current landscape for programmatic? It's a good thing to know. MORE

SOCIAL MEDIA: Whether you post scared or aggressively, there are at least 25 things you should never do in social. MORE ... Facebook's mobile arm of its audience network will close. MORE ... Instagram accounted for a quarter of Facebook's 2019 revenue. MORE ... Twitter's median age is 40 years old. MORE ... SnapChat continues to grow, which actually is kind of a problem for them financially. MORE .. Where did spending increase in 2020? Influencers and OTT. MORE ... There are rules for influencer marketing. MORE ... But are they impractical? MORE ... Influencers prefer to work directly with the brand, not through an intermediary. MORE

EMAIL: Here's a simplistic primer on a potentially powerful execution -- geotagging/geo-segmenting. MORE ... I'm a fan of click-to-open rate as a measure of engagement. This argues that click rate is also a consideration. MORE

AUDIO: Fueled by the podcast explosion, Spotify grew revenues by 24 percent YOY and gross profit by 19 percent. Not bad. MORE ... The Rooster Cast is available on Spotify, TuneIn, Alexa, Google, the Rooster web site, and Apple podcasts.

VOICE: Voice commerce isn't quite there yet, but despite the cynics, it's going to come for more than just soap and bread. MORE

VIDEO: YouTube is a great storage vehicle for videos, but if you are bringing video to Facebook, don't link to a YouTube video. MORE ... Chrome will begin blocking midrolls in short-form videos (8 minutes or less) as an alignment with the Coalition for Better Ads. You have until August to be ready for this. MORE

CONTENT MARKETING: Social and email distribution tools along with analytics tools are supporting most content strategies but managing content still looks to be a mess. MORE ... It's relevant quality, not quantity, folks. Seriously. Know what your audience wants, produce more of that. Simple. MORE

ANALYTICS: “If a result isn’t measurable – and there is no way to understand its success – then it is valueless.” MORE ... Now that we are beyond proving that digital programs need to be constantly optimized, we have to cut through the noise to focus attention on the right metrics to use for those optimizations. MORE

CHATBOTS: Google's Meena is scoring well in the open-domain category, meaning you can have a general conversation with her and feel like it's almost human. MORE

SEARCH: Google made some significant changes in January that will certainly mess with your search team. MORE ... Search is changing and you need to stay up to speed on the big ones. MORE ... In the market for the best SEO tools. Here's your list. MORE

PRIVACY: CCPA happened. Did you get ready? Here's another quick primer so you know what the deal is. MORE

WEB SITES: If you have key pages of your site that download slower than three seconds, you have work to do because you are causing your audience to bounce. MORE