Good customer experiences are the driving factor behind successful businesses today. Therefore, becoming “customer experience evangelists”, as Mark Hurd puts it, should be your entire organization’s goal. By putting customers first and focusing on meeting their expectations with consistently personalized engagement across all touchpoints, your team can deliver improved experiences that will build and retain customer loyalty.
According to a recent global survey, customer experience management is one of the top three strategic priorities for 45 percent of brands in 2019. Successful brands recognize the importance of good customer experiences and understand how these efforts set them apart from their competition. As Broadsuite Media Group CEO Daniel Newman has stated, “customers equate brands with experiences… From customer service to the digital journey to retail ambiance, our association with a brand is based on how it makes us feel.” Understanding this is the first step in creating a marketing strategy that appeals to your audience.
Here we’ll share a few tips for creating a marketing strategy to satisfy your customers’ individual needs.
Know Your Customer
To meet your customers’ expectations, you need to develop a deep understanding of who they really are. This can be achieved by creating buyer personas based on the characteristics of your ideal or target customer. Characteristics you should consider can include:
- Age
- Gender
- Location (depending on your business model)
- Occupation
- Goals, values, and interests
- Challenges, struggles, and frustrations
- Social networks used and/or preferred news sources
Assembling this information allows you to more effectively strategize your marketing efforts, by accounting for the physical and psychological aspects of customers that can impact their experiences. The more detailed you can get, the better. A buyer persona that only says “male age 18-35” says nothing about which individuals within that group might be most interested in your brand.
Build a Connection
Using the data from your buyer personas, you can figure out where your customers are and engage more directly. Building an emotional connection with consumers through their preferred channels can make all the difference in how they view your brand. In fact, research by Capgemini found emotionally engaged customers are:
- Likely to spend more – 70% will spend up to two times more on brands they’re loyal to.
- More likely to re-purchase – 82% will consistently return to their favorite brands.
- Willing to promote a brand to friends and family – 80% want to share good experiences.
Utilize Technology
Improving your marketing strategy with technology is a no-brainer. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help you dramatically improve customer experiences and engagement, particularly in ecommerce. One common use of technology in this sense can be seen in AI-powered chatbots. A study on artificial intelligence and chatbots found online stores using AI made 49 percent of their consumers more likely to buy more often, and prompted 38 percent to share their experiences with family and friends. These intelligent bots can deliver personalized, interactive and efficient assistance to each customer, appeasing their needs with minimal labor on your end.
Measure Your Efforts
You can’t improve your customer experience if you don’t measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Every stage of a customer’s journey affects their overall experience, so being thorough is important. A few recommendations for capturing customer feedback include:
- Quantitative surveys or other similar CX feedback, requested via automated emails.
- Post-purchase calls requesting feedback.
- Market research exploring consumers behaviors and perceptions of your brand.
- Incentivize customers to provide feedback.
Consumers have the upper hand today. Thanks to technology, they have the voice and the authority to impactfully spread the word about their experiences with your brand, whether good or bad. More people today look to their peers for reputable opinions, so you should make sure any conversations about your brand are good ones. Going the extra mile to provide “wow” experiences can help you achieve these goals, and we hope the advice in this piece helps a little help as well.