Customers are more savvy than ever, with the ability to find what they perceive they want, when they want it. If your marketing pillar can focus on aligning itself with your organizations other pillars to gain important customer insights and move towards a strategy that treats customers as profiles not simply personas, to create a truly individualized experience, you will suddenly be able to perceive what these customers want before they do. And that is where your edge on the competition and ticket to customer loyalty is.
So is being data driven just as an important business objective as being customer obsessed?
We discussed in previous posts that the Digital Journey Maturity Model brings to light a common misconception in digitization, “if we are going to be successful in digital, then we need to create something completely new”. This especially rings true within the marketing pillar. Echidna’s principal leadership comes from advising omni-channel for most of their careers at familiar names like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Dell, National Instruments, and Teleflora, where precise marketing was instrumental to company success and growth. From their experiences, the team at Echidna works with premise that you can not just walk away from your existing marketing practices and transform. Your marketing pillar is something you continue to build on throughout the life of your business, carrying customer data you had from yesterday, two years ago, ten years ago, and beyond to continually innovate and optimize how you keep growing your company.
The marketing pillar contains six sectors within it to evaluate and identify gaps when improving upon digital maturity.
- Segmentation: What are you doing to offer true indivilization? Mature businesses recognize the nuanced needs of their unique customers in real time, not past behaviors. This sounds complex, but with the right technologies and partners in place, you can make it appear effortless to the end user.
- Mobile Orientation: Do you know the percentage of your users that visit you via mobile (or would be more apt to do additional business with you if you updated your mobile)? More B2B and B2C buyers use mobile than ever before and the numbers continue to climb. These devices will further brand loyalty and engagement if you have a proper strategy in place to leverage UX site design, mobile apps (if appropriate), and device specific capabilities (geo-location, camera, notifications, etc.).
- Brand Promotion: These will ultimately drive traffic, but only if you have the data on the right customers to promote them too. One size does not fit all when it comes to promotions, so whether it is an exclusive online only promotion, BOGO, or bulk promotion- make sure you are targeting your ideal buyer to ensure maximum conversion.
- Search Marketing: Being able to help a customers find what what they want and when they need it via search marketing takes a mix on creative and technical know how. SEO best practices are continually evolving, so making sure you partner with a team that continues to learn in this field is the only way to ensure your brand and products are consistently associated with high-value keyword phrases and authoritative inbound links.
- Email Marketing: High-volume email marketing requires modern administrative & automation capabilities. In order to drive engagement and use email as an effective tool vs being put in the SPAM box forever, you need to invest in an email marketing platform for your unique business requirements and target customers based on real time data using a mixture of interactive content.
- Social Marketing: Mature companies understand the influence social media has on buyer behavior and how to use it properly. Leverage social media platforms and associated social media marketing platforms/providers to target relevant prospects and customers with ads and brand presence, but remember the golden rule in creating content, provide value to the reader and don’t promote yourself overtly (aka being a thought-leader).
Marketing in the digital age is a two-way conversation with people who demand you know what they want and when they want it. Your business must be invested in these ever-growing customer expectations, not competitors. The good news is that your customers are open to sharing information in exchange for these improved experiences. However, your challenge is being able to collect, analyze, synthesize, and react in real time to this customer information across numerous touchpoints and removing internal silos. Being able to evolve to identify these gaps in your marketing pillar, prioritize them, and create roadmap with measurable goals your team or partners can execute on is instrumental in success in converting new customers and keeping current customers loyal- in both B2B and B2C. The Digital Journey Maturity Model will offer insight to continuously innovate and optimize how you are reaching potential customers to achieve the success you strive for.
Is your marketing pillar aligned with your organizations other pillars to gain important customer insights and move towards a strategy that treats customers as profiles, not simply personas to create a truly individualized experience? At Echidna, we can help you find out and walk with you every step of the way.
