Marketing is an activity that every company is engaged in one way or another. Marketing is also a field that is constantly bombarded by new and “must have” technology, that will shortly fade into the the oblivion of history after doing a roadtrip of blog headlines and boardrooms. But there are also real innovation and useful technology with measurable impact changing the way we approach marketing.
Here’s our CEO Rinalds Sluckis sharing his point-of-view about this issue.
Every week I meet our customers across the Baltic States, discussing their business objectives and challenges, so I have a perfect opportunity to observe how different is the interpretation of “customer centricity” in various organizations of our region.
As self-explanatory and cliche the “focusing on your customer” might sound, I still find that many organizations do not understand the true meaning of this concept. Their communication and marketing campaign planning begins with ‘what products will we advertise to which customer segment’. Decisions are made based on dubious facts like ‘banner ad on this website worked well last Christmas, let’s do the same thing this year as well’. Data about consumer behavior and historic engagement is collected but rarely used because ‘we don’t really believe in this data’. Customer is almost never viewed and evaluated as an individual with particular needs and previous relationship with the brand. Instead he is targeted as part of a larger mass, a particular segment, mostly profiled according to demographics or socioeconomic parameters.
Last year The New York Times published a study that revealed that our average attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds in year 2000 to just 8 seconds in year 2015. The amount of information we’re exposed to every day is so overwhelming and our ability to process it so diminished that it’s pretty obvious that the only way for a business to communicate with their customer is to be super relevant in messaging and in the choice of a particular delivery channel. Personalized and automated communication management has to be an important part of every company’s approach to business and also of its technological infrastructure.
Personalized communication IS based on precise analysis of past and current customer behavior and previous communication experience, as well as data-based predictions future needs. All of which then leads to the delivery of a fully customized, very relevant message or offer at the most appropriate time and place.
Personalized communication IS NOT adding a customer’s name to your email and then delivering the same exact “Faux leather sofas with 25% off” message to a 100 thousand recipients.
I strongly believe that customer analytics, personalized marketing and automation of the communication campaigns is: 1) possible and available; 2) delivers significant returns, if certain rules are followed. This approach enables organization to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. “Right” meaning one that will deliver the biggest return in both long term relationship with the client as well as drive the short-term sales.
To achieve that there are 4 important factors that will let your company get the maximum ROI from each contact with the customer:
- Focus on customer needs and convenience, not your product and ‘internal circumstances’ that nobody cares about. Another cliche, yet so rarely seen in real life;
- Acknowledge that the role of marketing has changed. Marketing is no longer there to ‘package the message’. Instead the role of a marketing experts today us to be business builders, experience architects and insight activists. Fancy buzzwords? Yes, yet not without a reason. Using data analytics marketing can discover new business niches and opportunities for cross-sell. Marketing today is also responsible for the delivery of unified yet unique customer experience at all touchpoints.
- Trust your data and make only data based decisions. Statistics and mathematics are inherently unbiased and always work the same, no matter the circumstances. “We don’t trust our data” is almost always lack of understanding and refusal to dig deeper;
- Choose a knowledgeable technology partner and the most appropriate technology. Technology solutions at all kinds of price points are available today, so that every organization can get what is best suited for their needs.
There is a wide spectrum of business technology solutions that can help an organization to improve both its marketing processes and their returns. At Digital Mind we work with our customers on their marketing campaign automation, set up customer data analytics solutions that drive sales, as well as look at both campaign and overall company financial analytics, planning and budgeting. It enables us to see how large and often unexpected impact on the organization’s culture, management’s thought process and, of course, business results is delivered by even the smallest pilot projects.
So, if your company is looking to improve the customer satisfaction and marketing ROI by delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time, you’d do wisely to research and evaluate the concept of customer analytics and marketing personalization.
Because studies show that truly customer-centric and technologically advanced companies show better results across the board when compared to their less advanced competitors.
