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For today’s marketer, customer centricity is paramount. Yet with the proliferation of media – blogs, social media, mass advertising, email, text message and traditional direct mail, how do brands know how to best target their audience in the most relevant and engaging manner?
With limited alignment across countless customer touch points, no comprehensive view of the customer, lack of actionable analytics, in-consistent content, and in-accessible marketing technology to successfully implement an engagement strategy, this presents a challenge for marketers. It is not acceptable in today’s environment to communicate with your customers without some type of personalization. Sending mass marketing messages that lack personalization also lack authenticity and consequently results in in-effective marketing campaigns.
Social media opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the marketers, allowing brands to engage with customers like never before. A key part of customer centricity; however, is listening through all channels. So how can marketers know what channels to communicate through? Being customer centric is less about push and more about listening, learning, understanding and then speaking. While it’s important to communicate your brand message, most marketers fail to recognize that speaking is only one part of the equation.
Listen First
The goal is to really get to know the customer so you can deliver relevant, engaging communications – listen to everything they are telling you.
Learn Who Your Customers Are
Data from all your customer touch points should be part of a successful customer engagement strategy. Marketers need to take the information from various marketing, operational and transactional systems, strategically assessing what information needs to come together.
Understand What Your Customers Want
Tailoring content is dependent on knowing your customers. Apply insightful analytics to the data you gathered and act upon it to select content for future communications.
Speak to Them in an Engaging, Personalized Way
Seek opportunities to communicate directly with your customers, only when it is relevant and targeted – offline and online. If you frequent a local coffee shop, do they know your favorite order when you walk in the door? Why should it be any different when customers visit your website?
Overall, marketers must understand the transference in customer behavior – customers now own the relationship more than the organization does. It’s the responsibility of the marketer to recognize this fundamental shift in marketing.
