It has been quite a year—across all marketing fronts. Heading into 2017, marketers want to keep the momentum going in areas like content marketing, marketing automation, customer engagement and social analytics, just to name a few. Ask for the goals and strategies they will focus on next year, and marketers say the game plans involve engaging and growing their communities, along with analyzing customer patterns throughout their journeys.
"The imperative in 2017 for marketers will continue to be customer experience," says Wilson Raj, global director of customer intelligence for analytics leader SAS. "Winning at customer experience requires a combination of individualized insights, contextualized interactions, and fluid processes to engage the customer in their channels of choice."
Understanding the Customer and Buyer Behavior
In the race to know anything and everything about today's ever-sophisticated consumer, Mike Sciortino believes that focusing on the customer experience will be a major asset for any marketer. The founder of Gratitude Marketing and bestselling author of "Gratitude Marketing: How You Can Create Clients for Life," Sciortino says companies that become memorable work hard to master the art of consistent, creative, fun engagement and deliberate, emotional connection with their customers.
Sciortino says that knowing and creating the experience begins with asking the following questions:
- Do I have a systematic approach to consistently communicate with my top customers and top prospects
- What are the most effective methods I am using to reach my customers today?
- Do I have a carefully crafted and specific plan in motion to position myself to be the thought leader in my industry, marketplace and community resulting in me staying relevant and "top of mind" with my customers and prospects for when their need for my services arises?
- Which marketing strategies have worked to improve my business and which ones didn't work?
"To create the ultimate customer experience, be prepared to listen. Train your staff to listen intently to what customers are saying in the day-to-day operation of your business. Customers who feel like they are being heard feel accepted and appreciated."
—Mike Sciortino, founder of Gratitude Marketing
Retain Existing Customers
With the rising costs of customer acquisition, marketers such as Sciortino believe brands will place greater emphasis on nurturing what he calls the 3 Rs:
- Increased customer retention
- Increased customer referrals (one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing)
- Increased customer revenues (per customer)
"Customers want to be reminded that they are important to you," he says. "It's not up to your customers to remember you. It's your job to constantly and consistently remind them of who you are and reinforce why they have a relationship with you."
Collect Data to Personalize your Marketing Approach
Carlos Hidalgo, the founder, and CEO of ANNUITAS believes that collecting buyer intelligence regarding buying committees, purchase path, pain points, content consumption patterns, and preferred channels will be critical again in 2017.
"Marketers need to look at how they align to them," says Hidalgo, whose company develops and builds buyer-centric Demand Generation programs. "If this occurs across marketing organizations, we will see marketing become a growth driver for companies."
Hidalgo believes the trend in buyer sophistication and complexity and growing buying committees will force organizations to adopt buyer-centric strategies. "I see so many organizations building strategies around technology or tactics, but to get it right, the strategy has to have the buyer at the center," he says.
SAS' Raj says data will continue to be the foundation of marketing and brand strategy. Data-driven or algorithmic marketing will continue to expand as more marketers adopt algorithmic attribution over traditional rules-based attribution models such as first or last-click. "This approach will remove much of the subjectivity that currently plagues rules-based marketing attribution models," he says. "In content marketing and digital asset management, we’ll also see more algorithms used to assemble, analyze, and create meaningful content."
Be a Storyteller in your Marketing Communications
The need for brands to inject storytelling into their marketing to tap into people’s emotions, aspirations and needs have not changed. But SAS' Raj believes the way brands can tell their stories has changed. Today, a brand’s narrative is told through tweets, posts, crowd-sourced content, rich media, etc. "The best stories tap into people’s emotions because they genuinely connect to what a brand stands for," he says.
For example, stories that give a sense of belonging, confidence, failure or success provide the ability to connect a brand to someone's personal narrative. "The marketers who can best paint such pictures and create personal narratives are well on the way to establishing long-term brand loyalty," Raj says.
The Internet of Things (IoT)
In today's ever-changing marketplace, brands can’t ignore the Internet of Things (IoT) as a channel for customer experience and engagement. SAS' Raj believes that IoT presents an entirely new paradigm for building relationships with customers.
"In the past, the only connection between brand and consumer was typically a loyalty card or discount coupon," he says. "With IoT, brands can be connected via an expanding mesh of digital endpoints, devices, applications, etc. Brands must evolve and adapt their strategies to take advantage of the multi-way communications IoT affords."
In the end, marketing thought leaders say that when seeking to budget and maximize your marketing spend, realize that traditional marketing, like direct mail and in-person events, speaks at people. Today, it's about engaging and connecting with people. "This will grow your business in a deliberate and measurable manner and allow you to target better the clients you want to work with for the long term," Sciortino says. "It will position you to attract clients, not pursue them."
This article first appeared in Tactics Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 6.
