Marketing to customers in the digital era can be dizzying. Every day, new communication channels or apps emerge along with constant changes in technology. With every new possibility comes the challenge of how to create new profitable marketing models.
Would you like to connect with customers in a relevant and individualized manner? Do you aim to improve customer experience to create profitable relationships? The most effective marketing strategies today are designed around a customer journey (which is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand). These strategies make use of analytics in context and real time.
Brief Encounters: The Customer Journey of the Past
Before the digital era, traditional marketing models conceived customer interaction as a single point of contact: the consumer coming face-to-face with a product in a store, or when listening to a radio advertisement while driving. Marketing strategies have grown out of these expected encounters with targeted consumer groups, using insights from separate “silos” of experts.
These silos could include marketing, product management, communications, customer data, and sales departments. Companies set objectives and strategized the ways they could reach consumers in order to meet those.
The Journey Matures: Customer Experience Today
With rising customer expectations, consumer interaction has become a broader, more nuanced concept. Creating the right customer experience is a key differentiator and should therefore be among every CEO’s top three priorities. Throughout a customer journey, he or she meets brands in a variety of digital and analog spaces, from smartphones and wearables to print media and retail stores. Mapping these events to customer journeys across time and across channels shifts the focus of marketing strategy from merely meeting sales objectives to improving customer experience. 86% of the consumers already willingly pay more for better customer experiences. Effective marketing today is more than meeting company objectives. It requires an understanding of the customer’s life cycle and needs while taking a wide variety of touch points and metrics into account. Customer journeys can conceptualize this information and bring it to life leveraging analytics.
“Why the #CustomerJourney is the perfect approach for brands in the #Digitalera and better #CustomerExperience. “
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The Evolution of Marketing in the Digital Era
The developments in digital technology, multi-channel integration, analytics and cognitive marketing strategies have made the evolution of the customer journey possible.
The new and evolving digital reality is more than an extension of the analog. It is a completely new basis for consumer interaction with brands, products and services. Today´s customers value convenience. They are looking to complete a specific journey in an easy and timely fashion. Companies can follow customers on their journeys and promote brands in a more targeted, community based and contextual manner using digital and analog touch points. Customers have more choice and are more connected. They need relationships with brands. And brands need to use analytics to anticipate and act on customer choices for increased ROI. All in all, it is not just about products, but living services and an individualized experience.
Steve Jobs
You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.
Take the example of the digital strategy by Nike, which has been expanding in recent years from selling shoes and sports clothing into creating an entire digitally-based fitness ecosystem, providing training programs and communities, fitness tracking apps and devices, and expert advice on gear. After forming a partnership with Apple in wearable technology, websites and smartphone apps, Nike is now able to meet a wide variety of customer needs. The company builds customer relationships by developing insight-based services, tailoring products to their customers’ fitness journeys and moving toward a service model generating continuous revenue streams.
Integrated Digital and Analog Strategies: Mapping the Future of Marketing
A customer’s journey constantly shifts between the digital and analog world: a customer orders a ride home from the airport with a driving service using an app, but meets the driver in person, having found the service by reading a print ad.
Given the complexity of customer journeys, companies can’t afford to isolate digital strategy from other facets of marketing. Therefore, the integration of digital strategies into the overall marketing and advertising strategy is crucial for customizing customer experience and journey design. In order to implement customer journeys successfully, they have to be target group specific, distinct and mapped appropriately. Analytics and cognitive marketing strategies are crucial to this mapping. Mapping the customer journey to products and services allows brands to make successful connections with today’s digitally savvy consumers.
Taking an integrated approach to digital and analog marketing drives innovation and ideas that create superior customer experience. Journeys that are digitized across all interactions lead to the greatest customer satisfaction and will therefore lead to the biggest business impact.
Summary where is the “so what”
In order to build and sustain profitable customer relationships, companies must take the realities of the digital world into account. The marketing strategy needs to be moved beyond traditional isolated encounters between customers and brands and deliver a consistent end2end experience.
The digitalization has enabled marketing strategies to actively use and drive customer journeys in order to generate significant business value and to stay relevant to both the consumer and the brand. According to a McKinsey research, a company can increase revenues by 2-3 % for every 10-percentage point uptick in customer satisfaction. Companies can use customer journey mapping to understand customer needs and perspectives. They can start to build relationships with customers in a consistent manner across all touch points and improve customer experience using analytics and cognitive marketing.
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