Your organization’s marketing activities should no longer solely focus on your products or services. Instead, they should focus on your customers–and creating a positive, collective experience whenever and wherever they interact with your brand.
This marketing shift must occur because you’re no longer just vying for consumer attention for your products or services with your direct competitors. You’re also competing against the best customer experiences they’ve ever had with any brand.
Think about the exceptional experiences your customers have received from companies in other spaces, such as Starbucks, or Amazon. As a result of these experiences, consumers now understand what a great customer experience (CX) is or can be—and they want to receive one from all their brands.
And as some research reports suggest, consumers are willing to pay for great experiences too:1
- 65% of consumers find a positive CX to be more influential than advertising
- 73% say that a positive experience is among the key drivers that influence their brand loyalties
- 16% potential ROI increase on CX investments made
By taking strides to improve the way they deliver experiences—such as by shifting away from a product focus and instead toward a customer focus—marketers can create the positive experiences consumers demand—and deliver the ROI their organizations crave.
According to another report by Forrester, on average, customer experience leaders realize a 25% increase in revenue over customer experience laggards.
To act differently, you must think differently
Delivering positive experiences is critical to success in the digital age. But it’s not always easy.
If your way of delivering CX is ad hoc and doesn’t scale, you must think differently to remain competitive in today’s environment.
To do so, first determine what your ideal CX should look like. Then research and discover what your customers want and need—and any other issues they may be going through or experience in the future. That information should now drive every action and decision across your organization.
This kind of reverse engineering may require you to change up the processes you use to create customer experiences.
For example, by shifting the focus of those experiences away from your products or services, and instead toward consumer needs, your customers will learn they can trust your organization. They will realize you understand their problems and desires—or even can anticipate their future needs—and look to you for guidance, no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey.
And they will remember those positive experiences when they are ready to make a purchase.
Further, shifting to a customer focus helps ensure you continue to push out holistic and unified brand messages no matter which product or service may be applicable—or on which channel on which they are delivered. Focusing on customer needs rather than your products or services also can help you inherently shift to a new customer centric marketing model where the customer is at the center of your every activity and campaign, which will help ensure increased success.
In the digital age, successful companies will be those that can continuously evolve over time. They will be the ones that are good at understanding changing customer behaviors and expectations and adopting new processes for delivering new exceptional experiences as a result.
But they won’t be able to do that without first shifting the marketing focus back to their customers.
For more information about the processes and technologies marketers must use to reverse engineer their customer experience, listen to our recently recorded webinar or read our ebook.