Successful marketers adopted a customer-centric approach long before the pandemic. But changes over the past two years have impacted customer experience expectations, and marketers need to use every technology at their disposal lest they leave their customers behind.
“The way we engage has changed significantly over the past few years,” said Brian Rowley, vice president of marketing at Panasonic Systems Solutions North America, speaking at the MarTech conference last spring. “Our digital world gives customers the opportunity to take more control and drive our engagement process.”
He added, “This forces us as brands to listen more carefully to the needs and the needs of those customers. , and satisfy them where they are.”
Here are three important ways brands need to leverage technology to ensure that customers remain a top priority.
Dig: What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and is it the future of content management?
Use technology to listen and understand
Since customers have more control over how they interact with brands, marketers of these brands must develop their listening skills.
“It’s important for brands to stay agile and measure and monitor the changes they see in their audiences, including where they are and how they spend their time,” said Rowley.
comes down to correlation. Brands don’t want to waste their customers’ time, nor their own company’s resources, leaving the message flat.
To keep up with changing sentiment, marketers should use social listening tools and deploy sentiment analysis of incoming signals through social as well as other channels through which customers express their thoughts.
“Consumers have made it very clear unless you listen to them,” Rowley said. “Not only will they stop listening, they will actually call you out.”
Brands should not only listen, but they should also prove to customers that they have taken feedback to heart.
“Our customers give us feedback and we go back and ask for it again without any changes, and that’s an important part for us to make sure we don’t,” Rowley said.
To achieve brand goals, marketers need to identify which channels are most important to customers and then ensure brands are dominant on these key channels.
Design authentic customer-centric experiences
Brands showcase the best way they understand their customers told them through content and other experiences. These experiences must be fine-tuned for audiences using customer data and personalization.
In the case of Panasonic, they market to multiple audiences, and best practices for one audience don’t necessarily translate to others, according to Rowley.
Dig: How to use artificial intelligence to discover the reasons behind customer behavior
“Needs related to each of these customers are all so different that we have to rely on technology to help us customize the experience and deliver the message that is most authentic to that group and most relevant to what they are looking for,” Rowley explained.
Because customers have more control than ever over the channels they use, they can easily shut out marketers who aren’t sending relevant messages.
)
Get MarTech! Daily. free. in your inbox.
Measure the impact and adjustment of experience
“You must To measure what’s working and what’s not, you actually have to be willing to adjust those areas that need improvement,” Rowley said.
One of the most important advancements in technology is the ability for marketers to measure the impact of experiences in real time. To take full advantage of this, marketers should employ a test and learn strategy.
“Data makes us agile,” Rowley said. “When we start focusing on testing and learning, we can start transforming the experience around the customer.”
He added, “It’s not just about marketing. It’s important to make sure all our teams … also align their messaging, including sales teams and partners. It really comes down to it being everyone’s responsibility to take and embody that approach.”
Digital experience technology engages everyone Come in so they can focus their content and messaging strategy on the most important piece of the puzzle, the end user as your customer.
Using technology to improve Third on Vimeo Door Media’s customer experience.
About the author
Chris Wood has over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and reporter. At DMN, he served as an associate editor, providing original analysis for the growing field of marketing technology. He interviewed leaders in technology and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, who was named America’s first federal CIO by Barack Obama. He is particularly interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel discussion on “Innovation Theater” at the Fintech Inn in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused coverage on industry sectors such as Robotics Trends, The Age of Modern Breweries, and AdNation News, Wood writes for KIRKUS and writes fiction, criticism, and poetry for several leading book bloggers. He studied English at Fairfield University and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.
)
