Tipping the Marketing Scale on Customer Experience
Marketing in the digital age requires brands to embrace new tactics, forge new alliances to enhance the customer experience. Though challenging, the organisations investing in these areas are the ones winning the battle for new customers and market share. The way in which brands connect with customers has transformed entirely. From the channels used and […]
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Marketing in the digital age requires brands to embrace new tactics, forge new alliances to enhance the customer experience. Though challenging, the organisations investing in these areas are the ones winning the battle for new customers and market share.
The way in which brands connect with customers has transformed entirely. From the channels used and content created to the partners, there’s only one constant element – the goal of enhancing the customer experience. As customer expectations and the engagement landscape continues to evolve, there are two areas in which brands must invest heavily to achieve success – adopting new marketing tactics and creating new alliances.
Are Go-To Tools and Tactics Enough for Marketing Success?
The short answer? No The mobile-first digital world of today means there’s really no downtime for customer engagement. Today’s experience battle is never-ending, which means your strategy must extend to wherever your customer is and wherever they may go. Successful strategies need insights to anticipate the needs of a brand’s customers, agility to act and react to target markets and competitors, and speed to do it all quickly.
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Legacy marketing tools won’t fit the bill anymore. The days of mass marketing, stand-alone campaigns, programs that can’t tie individual tactics to ROI and product-centric messages are gone.
The success of a brand depends on its willingness to incorporate new tactics, ensuring its strategy will deliver a personalised, relevant, and phenomenal experience, each and every time. Customer preferences must influence these tactics as well – engaging with the audience when they want, where they want, and how they want. If brands aren’t gathering and leveraging insights, even their loyal customers will begin to leave. In fact, according to PWC, “1 in 3 consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.”
Delivering this exceptional front-end customer experience, however, requires your back-end marketing operations to be streamlined, automated, and fully integrated. That means your people, processes, and technology must be agile, flexible, and able to keep up with the constant demand for new, quality content.
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Your ability to manage the entire content lifecycle is critical for providing the ongoing, unique customer experience that people have come to expect. Brands that can optimise their entire marketing operations — from ideation & planning and creation & approvals to distribution and performance management can increase speed to market with customised, targeted campaigns for all their buyer personas, segments, regions, or markets.
How Important Is Brand Collaboration When It Comes to the Customer Experience?
Banding together all facets of the organisation is crucial for success. Although brands may internally recognise certain departments as separate arms of the organisation, consumers do not. Every touchpoint customers have with an organisation impacts their experience and perception of the overall brand. They don’t differentiate between corporate and digital marketing, customer service or sales; they view each experience, good or bad, as a reflection of the brand as a whole. This means each conversation and interaction must be meaningful and consistent, regardless of the channel or device on which it comes.
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As multiple groups within your organisation are likely trying to deliver messages to the same customers, collaboration is key. Siloed approaches to interacting with customers can create a chaotic go-to-market strategy internally. Whether it be brand marketing, corporate marketing, digital marketing, sales, customer service, line of business, e-commerce, or beyond, it’s important to synchronise all departments to avoid a disjointed and confusing brand experience for customers.
The best way to avoid this confusion and streamline the experience is for marketing to forge alliances with those departments interacting with the customer. It must help these allies understand the new customer journey, how their role fits, and how their efforts can impact other parts of that journey. This step will likely be the most difficult and time consuming for your organisation. Moreover, it may require a change management initiative to ensure everyone on your team is on board.
It’s certainly going to be a challenge to change the way your brand is organised and operates. But the organisations that pull it off are the ones winning the battle for new customers, market share, and sales because they can deliver exceptional customer experiences beyond just marketing initiatives.
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Is Disrupting the Status Quo Really Worth It?
If an organisation is looking to be successful in today’s digital age, digital transformation requires intentional disruption – disruption to processes, technologies, and even how your organisation is structured. This may sound intimidating, but to deliver a great customer experience, you must step out of your comfort zone when it comes to technology and collaboration. You must embrace new tactics, embrace new allies, embrace the ways customers interact with your brand, and embrace marketing success in the new digital era.
