According to Forbes, it is expected that by 2020, customer experience will be the most important reason for a customer to choose for a specific company or brand. This shows that the customer’s experience has become more important than the product or the price. Marketing is anything that impacts the customer.
A customer’s experience is more than an interaction with a brand’s website, company representative, or product. Rather, it is the sum of its parts, and the entire experience in itself needs to reflect a smooth and enjoyable experience.
When businesses focus their marketing around their customers, not only do the customers benefit, but the company does as well. Customer centric marketing results in better customer brand relationships, lower acquisition costs, and higher referrals as the level of satisfaction increases.
After all, the customer doesn’t make a distinction about internal corporate departmental divisions, reporting structures, or business activities. The customer simply has experiences with a company and makes a conclusion about that company. Which is why every touchpoint a customer has should be optimized to be the best possible experience.
Using marketing automation to improve customer experience.
Designing and implementing an effective strategy can be difficult, as it requires in-depth knowledge of your customer, the market, as well as information about the success (or failure) of certain techniques. Not every company is equipped to produce an effective marketing campaign, which becomes evident when they experience some of the following challenges in their marketing:
- An incomplete picture of their customer
- One size fits all communication
- Not enough information about their target group(s)
- Unclear success metrics
If these challenges sound familiar to you, it is time to get your brand’s communication on track by investing in marketing automation, which can be done in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Steps to take to kick start marketing automation are:
1. Identify, Research, and Create Personas:
Know who your customers are. What are their needs and desires? How do they behave? Create personas that reflect your customers. But wait, before personas can even be created, input from your your customer as well as a diverse group of people from within your company is needed.
To gain these insights, we conduct strategic customer sessions several times a year to make sure we are in tune with our customers. From there, we use the Design Thinking Center’s persona template (download below) to create the personas.
Using the customer and company insights that were collected in the first step, the Customer Journey maps out the process your customer goes through when it comes to your product or service.
3. Define the Moments of Truth
Define the moment in the Customer Journey when you want to interact with the customer and add value. Take this moment and build upon it in the following steps.
4. Define KPI’s with the use of the See, Think, Do Care model
Similar to step 3, in this part of the process you want to define what you want to achieve. This allows you to know which marketing communication activities need to be created and how these will be measured.
By defining KPIs and consistently measuring the results of your marketing activities, you can identify and make changes to optimize your marketing efforts.
5. Create Marketing Communication
After combining all of the insights from the previous steps, you will be able to formulate a focussed and effective marketing communication campaign.
6. Measure, Learn, and Optimize
Finally, the point we’ve all been waiting for, the actual launch of your customer centric marketing campaign.
Through the use of marketing automation tools, you will be able to track and measure your progress. This will allow you to see the direct results of your efforts, test your campaigns, as well as optimize future campaigns through the collected metrics
Takeaways
With these insights in mind, you’re ready to get started on your marketing optimization with marketing automation. Just keep in mind the following:
- Today’s market demands that customers are the focal point of your marketing efforts.
- Learn about your customer through in-depth research or by talking to them directly.
- Be sure to prepare for your marketing automation by doring all the necessary research and planning.
- Consistently monitor your results, test different strategies, adapt, and optimize.
Bring on the future
Do you want to be ready for 2020? Shoot me a message and let’s discuss how we can get your brand on track to success with marketing automation and, ultimately, proving an optimal customer experience.
