Any CMO will tell you that one of their ongoing business challenges is consistently engaging with both their existing and prospective customers across all channels. According to a recent study issued from the CMO Council, nearly 80 percent of senior B2B marketing executives admit that they fail to deliver updated news and insights about accounts and prospects to their sales organisations. With all of the updated technology and marketing data available to build effective customer experience campaigns, why aren’t organisations taking greater advantage?
As a CMO I find this frustrating, but I completely understand the difficulties of knowing where to start. To compete as a customer-centric organisation in 2014, companies must break away from the status quo and modernise, to deliver a global customer experience across all channels, devices and languages. There are three things marketers can ensure they’re doing right away to move toward this modernisation, utilise a cloud delivery model, leverage available customer data effectively and make language and culture a priority.
1. Utilize the Cloud: The cloud delivery model enables organisations to optimise multi-channel customer experiences from any device, understand brand health and product perception in real-time, and nimbly adjust campaign strategies to increase marketing effectiveness and impact revenue. Cloud technologies are also faster to implement, easier to maintain and offer increased flexibility and increased ROI. It sounds almost too good to be true, right? If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re not alone. Despite all of these benefits, marketers haven’t always been the first to embrace this technology delivery model. However, now that the technology has advanced, and is more robust and more secure, marketers have begun to accept cloud as their go-to, preferred delivery model with on-premise as aplan B. Considering the increased need to be agile and to respond to customers in real-time, it is critical for brands to make the shift to the cloud if they haven’t already.
2. Take Advantage of Customer Data: In a world where the customer is in control, brands must continuously enhance, optimise, enable and support the customer journey. A great place to start is to develop a deep understanding of the behavioural characteristics of your most important customer segments. By listening to, understanding and analysing customer data, organisations can effectively predict buying behaviours and identify brand advocacy across the entire customer journey. This involves defining key personas of customers, developing playbooks as prescriptive guidance for how to move customers along their journeys toward desired behaviours, and setting KPIs that measure the most important customer behaviours as well as organisational behaviours. Ultimately, this process enables brands to better understand their customers, resulting in more personalised and targeted communications to convert customers across the entire buyer journey.
3. Converse with Your Customers in Their Language: Fortune 500 companies have admitted that while they deliver product information in up to 35 languages, they often only provide support in one or two languages. This is an obvious break-down in the customer experience. To avoid this, marketers should utilise translation technology solutions that enable the delivery of content across languages for new markets in near real time. Another thing to keep in mind is that localisation goes beyond translation. Not only should customers be able to read communications in their native languages, but the content must be relevant and personalised for their cultures. To manage the complexity of global multilingual campaigns, marketers should leverage tools that include localisation services and technology to consolidate and optimise the most relevant multilingual content, multilingual SEO, social media analysis and campaign analysis.
Incorporating these three steps is a good start into any customer experience marketing campaign, and any CMO or B2B marketing executive will see the results improve over time. With consumers today wanting quicker responsiveness, a combination of technology and efficiency makes a quality experience possible.
