BrazilThe future of marketing: Build a best-in-class customer experience
The nature of marketing is changing rapidly. Today, most consumers expect a sublime experience with a top-notch customer service. But how can companies build a best-in-class marketing experience? Tim van der Galiën and Ruth Bos from Capgemini Invent share their vision.
The expectations of consumers are rising with no end in sight. They expect to interact with brands 24/7, at every touchpoint, and expect the traditional one-way dialog from the brand to the consumer to be replaced by a two-way conversation.
Meanwhile, they also expect rapid response times on their requests, personalization of content and offers, and well-timed initiatives so they get the information they need at the exact moment they need it.
So how can marketing leaders respond to manage these sky-high expectations? The keywords are data and connection.
Data-driven real-time marketing
As customers crave personalized engagement delivered through multiple channels, it is crucial to deliver the right experience, at the right time, at every touchpoint. Data is at the heart of a great experience. Marketing teams that were traditionally more focused on brand awareness and demand generation, now become a lot more data-focused.
Due to the continuous interaction with brands, there is an exponential increase in the volumes of data available. Think for example about your personalized interface or suggestions after buying a product or service via a website. This real-time data enables companies to get insights into every touchpoint of the customer journey. This allows marketers to gain an unprecedented level of customer insights, to eventually deliver customized experiences in real-time and at scale.
Real-time marketing can process, analyze, and leverage data to swiftly enhance digital commerce campaigns, increase brand awareness, customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and customer retention.
Leading marketers are merging creative inspiration with real-time signals to create brand awareness and engagement at an unprecedented scale. The convergence of technology, creativity, and data is not only possible but essential; when the free-flowing creative process meets the precision of advanced data use with the right technological tools, they can create a powerful impact to make sure marketing wins.
Innovative technologies and exponentially increasing data must be managed to activate and captivate customers with data-driven, contextualized marketing experiences, eventually driving brand success.
A connected approach
The marketing leader plays a key role in creating a connected marketing experience. They must answer important questions with regards to the interactions consumers have with their brand:
- What do customers want and when do they want it?
- What touchpoints are your customers using?
- What are your customers saying about their experience?
- How do you deliver a seamless end-to-end journey?
It requires a bold approach for Chief Marketing Officer to connect the dots between these wide ranges of activities and requirements to achieve future readiness. How to do that?
1. Marketing organization
Make sure you make people and culture part of the change within your organization. The success of a redesign of the marketing organization is very much dependent on the culture and people within the organization. Highly engaged teams show up to 22% greater profitability and are almost five times more likely to perform their best work.
It is important to include agencies in your organizational design and culture from the start as well.
Organize yourself around the customer journey in an end-to-end operating model (holistic marketing organization) – do not only focus on the marketing department but connect all departments that are directly or indirectly connected to the customer journey: marketing, sales, services, IT, etc.
2. Customer activation
Explore new ways to interact with your customers, to win in today’s market. For example, by using gamification in designing your loyalty app to engage your customer in a playful way.
It is important to create insightful content that speak to your customer, redesign your loyalty programs to provide real value and define & deliver real-time customer activation through actionable data insights and intelligent technologies.
3. Marketing technology
Design and deploy the right set of solutions and tools, marketing technology (MarTech) is used to understand what it is that customers want, why they want it and what they intend to do next. MarTech drives customer and marketing team interaction, measure effectiveness, and facilitate data-driven decisions. Marketing leaders that utilize 70% of the MarTech stack’s capabilities will achieve 20% better marketing ROI than peers.
It is highly important to not treat these activities as siloed challenges to solve. You can use the priorities of your high-value customer segments to define the structure of your times.
Or, equally relevant, use the needs of your customer-centric teams to build a MarTech basis that enables them to focus on what really matters: delivering relevant and outstanding experiences for customers.
