Raise Your Standards: Functional Symmetry & Sharpening Digital Touchpoints

“Does your digital presence reflect the quality of the services you provide?”

This is one of my favorite questions I like to ask new and prospecting clients.

Earlier in this blog, I mentioned the importance of symmetry – reflecting your offline presence to your online presence, essentially.

This symmetry is important for many reasons, but most of all it’s helpful in producing a consistent memory of your business as customers or clients interact with your digital assets.

While I touched on basic symmetry in that post, today I want to take it a step further – adding more depth by looking at not just surface level symmetry, but also functional symmetry.

Functional Symmetry

In this context, functional symmetry means that the characteristics of service or products you provide – not just their visual representation – survive the translation to the digital world.

A quick example: let’s say you offer an incredibly efficient, well-organize, seamless service in the offline world. It’s consistent, professional and something you’ve worked incredibly hard on to improve.

However your digital/visual assets are aged, your website is disorganized, listings are outdated, posting is inconsistent and everything is somewhat random online.

If the only thing a customer knew about your business was how they experienced you online – they likely would have the impression those degraded digital efforts left; and may hold them back from knowing the real version or canonical version of your small business.

What Are Digital Touchpoints?

If you think of every digital asset you have (text/copy, visual branding, media, website) and how they’re represented across different channels (search, AI, social media profiles, forums/groups, et al.) as existing on figurative “surfaces” (like a surface of an object) that your customers or clients can interact with, each one creates a figurative “touchpoint”.

They can read, watch, listen, scroll, navigate, search, click, tap, share, comment, save, forward and other actions via these different surfaces.

Every single interaction across these different touchpoints becomes important, then — accumulating over time. That accumulation slowly shapes how you exist (and are remembered) not just in the digital world, but also in the minds of your audience.

A few flaws or mistakes across digital touchpoints aren’t necessarily bad – but failure to improve them over time or not having a functional connection to your offline presence can be something that can hold you back.

Reflecting Function In Form (And What Improvement Actually Means)

If you’ve gone through the extremely difficult effort of having the best customer/client service, using the best products and tools and establishing the highest standards for project delivery — why stop short when it comes to your digital presence?

Of course, everyone is trying to be functionally better than the other options available to a particular segment of the population, but what, exactly, does that mean?

Your representation online is a combination of text, designs, photos, videos, podcasts and other interactive experiences — things they read, view, touch and listen to, so improvement means improving these areas.

Create better copy (text content) – use professional writers.

Create better visuals (professional logo/visual branding & other designs) – use professional designers.

Use professional photographers and videographers for your most important moments.

Opt for high quality recording equipment (for DIY photos, videos and auditory media).

Reflect the quality of your offline services and experiences consistently across all of these sensory experiences (sight, sound, et al.) in the digital world.

Look across your digital efforts and ask yourself: does every place I experience my small business online reflect all the hard work I put into my offline efforts?

If not, it’s time to start raising your standards – and sharpen up those assets this fall and winter.