Putting the customer at the center of a marketing strategy, through more relevant engagement, is an effective step toward delivering true customer experience marketing. The goal is to become customer-centric by exceeding customer expectations with messages and offers they actually want, not ones based off of a company-centric agenda.
Knowing customers well enough to deliver relevant and personalized experiences is the cornerstone to customer experience marketing. Below are six tips toward creating your own marketing strategy to truly engage your customers.
- Aim for customer centricity
- Customer centricity requires that everyone in the organization be onboard, and that starts from the top.
- Make every interaction with a customer a “moment of truth,” – be as relevant and personal as possible.
- Provide omni-channel engagement – the customer experience needs to be consistent, integrated, and seamless across the entire journey.
- Satisfy customer expectations
- View customers as active drivers of business and ask how to bring them in through conversation and engagement.
- Use customer feedback to make changes or improvements to constantly meet and exceed their demands.
- Deliver the kind of the superior expectations that help build customer loyalty and brand evangelists.
- Consider each stage of the customer journey
- The customer journey is no longer a fixed process, but rather a more complex, non-linear experience.
- The entire organization is responsible for touchpoints along a customer journey.
- Deliver messages and offers in a personalized, timely, and relevant manner.
- Adapt to customer demands
- Focus on meeting the needs of your customers and examine how you can meet those needs with your products or services.
- Listen, observe, and respond with quick and relevant responses.
- You can only exceed customer expectations by delivering value, listening and engaging, and creating personalized, branded experiences.
- Engage customers in the right context
- Marketers need to connect with customers in the manner that best suits them – inbound or outbound – on the device, channel, and at the time that meets their individual needs.
- Be prepared and able to interact with your customers consistently, across all your channels at each step of their journey.
- Marketing infiltrates the entire organization
- Customers don’t separate marketing from the product, marketing from their in-store or online experience, or marketing from the company, which makes everyone in the organization responsible for marketing.
- Companies should become marketing vehicles, and the marketing organization should become the customer-engagement engine responsible for all tasks relating to customer engagement approaches.
- There must be a mind-set around creating customer interaction touchpoints that add up to create a memorable customer experience.
What are your company’s most engaging marketing efforts?
