Editor’s note: Larry Weber and Lisa Leslie Henderson are co-authors of The Digital Marketer: 10 New Skills You Must Learn to Stay Relevant and Customer-Centric. For more information click here.
Marketers have been gulping down change for the last decade. Low-cost and ubiquitous communications technology has rapidly changed human behavior, causing seismic shifts in marketing philosophy, practices and careers. At its core, marketing is still about creating and keeping customers, but the “how-to” questions for accomplishing this have changed considerably.
As challenging as it is to be a marketer during one of the most rapidly changing business environments in history, both our customers and our businesses are benefiting from the disruption. The numerous changes that digital has ushered in are forcing us to move away from our traditional producer-based strategies and tactics, to focus on meeting our customers’ needs and desires. Organizations that have grasped the new reality and are redesigning the way they engage with their prospects and customers are discovering a new source of competitive advantage: remarkable customer experience. Successful companies are becoming customer-obsessed, creating highly relevant experiences that engage and delight their customers on a regular basis, across the entire customer journey. Think Amazon, Marketo, Warby Parker, IBM, USAA and L.L. Bean.
Myriad new tools and skills are making this new level of customer-centricity possible, including: combined big and little data and analytics; marketing automation; design thinking; customer journey analysis; converged media strategies; public and private social communities; software integration; location-based technology; content marketing; and near-field communications technology. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
While much complexity remains, we are now entering an age of refinement. This is not to imply that innovation will stop, or that the pace of business will slow, or that those who are on top of the heap today will be there in another 20 years, or even two months from now. There is change ahead but the innovation on the horizon builds upon the seismic advances that have already transformed the business landscape, rather than disrupting it on the scale we have seen during the past decade. Shakeouts, consolidations, bankruptcies and initial public offerings will be plentiful as the market integrates and matures.
Marketers still have work to do to be successful in this next phase. Indeed there are 10 new skills that marketers must learn – now – to be able to compete on the basis of customer experience.
1. Marketers are becoming experience architects, able to design and deliver relevant experiences around products, services and places. To do so, marketers need to think holistically, designing integrated experiences across the entire customer journey, from upfront customer acquisition to customer service, retention and collaboration, and across multiple channels. Knowledge of design thinking and customer journey analysis help us build effective interactions as these disciplines help us more deeply understand our customers, the context surrounding their needs and desires and how they experience our brands at all stages of their journey with us. A basic understanding of the tenets of the emerging field of behavior science helps us orchestrate the conditions that are likely to induce a target behavior and create enduring habits around our brands.
2. Marketers are combining big and little data with powerful analytics to gain proprietary insight into customers and to enhance brand experience. Insight derived from new fields of information and combined data streams deepens our understanding of our targets, prospects and customers and builds a dynamic context and predictive component for our interactions. This ability is critical, as relevance is rapidly becoming essential to being found by potential prospects, and to sales, ongoing engagement, advocacy and collaboration.
3. Marketers are scaling creative, personalized communications across channels and throughout the customer journey using marketing technology platforms. Today’s marketing automation tools are evolving rapidly and are quite powerful. Embedded predictive analytics identify more qualified prospects and sophisticated lead-scoring techniques based on real-time behavior steward prospects through the customer journey in a customized fashion. Closed-loop analytics make it possible for companies to accurately trace pipeline, sales and after-sales customer activity back to the originating marketing and sales initiatives. Quantifying marketing’s impact on revenue validates our role and often facilitates greater alignment between marketing and sales.
4. Marketers are employing rich content to tell and catalyze stories. Content fuels engagement throughout today’s customer journey. A steady stream of relevant content is also essential to make effective use of marketing automation. Knowing how various types of content resonate with our prospects and customers and being able to contextualize our interactions across our customers’ preferred channels with the appropriate cadence helps us break through the noise.
5. Marketers are identifying relevant social networks, building authentic presences and often creating our own digital communities to better connect with our customers. Social media has multiplied the number of possible touchpoints with our prospects and customers and has transformed static one-way messaging into dialogue. Successful companies are becoming transparent and responsive, engaging with constituents publicly and in real-time to build brand awareness, generate leads, engage customers and foster advocacy. Many companies are also establishing their own private customer communities to foster co-creation of products and services.
6. Marketers are adopting converged media strategies to augment our brands’ reach and credibility. The delineations among paid, earned and owned media are blurring as marketers incorporate customers’ content into our own content, as professional bloggers are paid to create content for our blogs and as sponsored content populates social media news feeds and publishers’ sites. With organic reach waning on platforms like Facebook, marketers must be able to evaluate the variety of emerging paid media options for extending reach and determine their usefulness for our brands.
7. To build loyalty, marketers are proving a brand’s allegiance to customers, rather than asking for the reverse. Loyalty erosion is pervasive and despite their name, many existing loyalty programs do little to foster loyalty. The best way to create loyalty is by delivering a remarkable and consistent customer experience. Loyalty programs that augment the customer experience, by automating payments or loyalty points, have a much higher chance of being utilized. While we often measure loyalty program adoption, utilization is the name of the game, as it generates proprietary data that can be used to further enhance our customer experience.
8. Marketers must be agile, able to test ideas, read customer behavior and make adjustments in real time. Expectations for continual customer engagement, rapid proliferation of new platforms, the rise of behavior-based communication and shorter development cycles requires that marketers become more agile and responsive than we have been in the past. Answering the call, marketers are testing young ideas and potential improvements to programs in real markets and designing marketing programs in smaller components that can be tested, combined and recombined to for maximum flexibility.
9. Customer experience is a systems-level opportunity, requiring marketers to be able to lead a highly synchronized, ecosystem-wide effort. Building relationships with our prospects and customers involves integrating multiple – and often siloed – groups within our own organizations and across our broader ecosystems as multiple functions support each of our customer interactions. To realize the customer experience advantage, marketers must be able to inspire these multiple moving parts to work together toward customer-obsession.
10. Marketers must proactively manage their careers, regularly nurturing their networks, skills and creativity. Resourcefulness is essential in today’s marketplace and responsibility for being on the cutting edge has by providing unprecedented access to people, events and discussions shifted to each of us as individuals. The Web has simplified this task, although it does come with the risk of being overwhelmed. Nurturing our creativity requires additional care, often requiring an intentional emptying, rather than a rush to take more in.
* * *While marketers still have a lot of change to digest, in the near term, we will have the opportunity to chew a little more thoroughly. As we savor each new marketing morsel that the last decade has put on our plate, we will discover and enjoy new flavor combinations, spark our creative juices and build more productive relationships with customers whether they are already seated the table or just coming through the door.