Marketing and digital customer experience touchpoints have been transforming dramatically in the last couple of decades but when the number of digital channels started to increase, most of the industry professionals thought “it was just another channel/method introduced” along with the existing ones to reach out to audiences, and yet, only effort given was “to be in there”, but not actually to drive a holistic conversation and engagement through the customer lifecycles, while sticking into a decent digital strategy.
Today, the path to purchase is not linear anymore. Millions of different interests & micro-segments exist, and consumers live in (micro) moments. Thus, brands have a very limited time/window of opportunity to communicate messages as audiences’ attention is very fragmented due to channel chaos and message bombardment from multiple sources. The challenge for today’s brands is to create an exceptional customer experience as well as a sound brand experience to get out of this chaos.
Then, suddenly, “an unseen” driver of change has arrived in recent months, where COVID-19 accelerated all these transformation drivers and efforts in every company who are reluctant (or afraid) to change! In a matter of months, consumer behavior has further been digitized at the utmost level, introducing many first-time users or escalated usage of existing digital services, and companies started to address these needs in various ways.
It is important to note that this requirement of change is not new, but only stimulated with these “unfortunate motivators”. All digital transformation roadmaps are now at the top of the agenda and the road to the innovative customer experience is accelerated.
Today, marketing and digital transformation efforts are inevitable and must be turned into growth drivers of the company. Metrics should also be set to connect digital activities to these drivers. Customer experience and marketing efforts shall go beyond communicating sales promotions, or brand awareness only, but towards creating more qualified leads for sales teams as well as generating more customer insight while providing meaningful customer journeys to all designated audiences.
Customer journeys are not linear anymore, thanks to many digital channels in use of customers today. What’s more, one customer has “many facades” when it comes to buying behavior. Thus, the same person may act with different behavior patterns, i.e. a “father”s buying behavior and interest categories is very much different than a “husband”s and then a “business owner”s, which all three might turn out to be the same person, i.e. for a single retailer! That’s why traditional segmentation approaches do not work anymore. In order to respond to this reality, brands must clearly define buying personas and their respective journeys even before starting to plan channel communications.
Long gone the days of antagonism between marketing and technology teams. Today, success comes with the effective collaboration of both parties. Marketing professionals must associate themselves with technology and upskill themselves quickly for working with AdTech and MarTech, apart from some programmatic advertising environments introduced by walled gardens of Google and Facebook.
Labrys offers a “segregation of duties framework” for marketing and technology leaders within the organization when it comes to aligning in “digital customer experience strategy”.
Single-channel, multiple channels, cross-channel… These are all outbound perspectives that put the brand/company in the center of planning which are designed according to existing budgets and skillsets. But the customer wants an omnichannel experience. Period. So, you must redesign your talent, organization, marketing strategy, digital assets created, etc. and try to create an omnichannel digital customer experience, where there is only “one single brand” in customer’s perception and “one single connected experience” with that brand, regardless of who is responsible to run that channel in the brand organization.
Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic by @chiefmartec contains 8.000 solutions by 2020. (Click here to enlarge). This is a 5,233% growth since 2011! Google and Facebook should not be the only “technologies” in your world.
Lookout and incorporate any technology and process into your marketing efforts that would enable you to design a connected and omnichannel digital customer experience. In order to get there, marketing people must attain new skill sets each and every day and get closer and closer to technology that resonates to their world.
Your new generation architecture must utilize your existing operational technology but shall be completely flexible and architected for use of marketing professionals. Pieces of this architecture must be brought together with a holistic “Digital Customer Experience (DX) Strategy” but in a “Lego-like” approach, where pieces of it might be put together brick by brick on top of each other.
Connecting anonymous and known behaviors of personas and optimizing journeys is key in a successful DX Strategy. So, one should start with defining what data is for their organization. Data is the fuel of all successful DX strategies and must be processed well if you want to get any returns. Hence, it would be your strategy on “data” that will drive your phasing in creating your modern “Digital Customer Experience Architecture”.
After that take a look at the categories of marketing technology that grew since 2019 in Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic by @chiefmartec. You may access his detailed blog post by clicking here
All these growth categories might signal you where to steer your wheels and assess what’s missing in your existing landscape.
Labrys provides its clients with a comprehensive “Digital Customer Experience Strategy” and a “Customer Experience & Marketing Technology Architecture” Framework. If you think you need to consult and review your existing investments and need to move the extra mile, please click here to contact us
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