Technology has forever changed the customer journey. Gone are the days when sales and marketing teams guided customers through a clearly defined sales funnel. In today’s technology-driven market, customers are in charge of how they experience and engage with your brand, bouncing from channel to channel at the touch of a keyboard or tap of a screen.
In order to build trust, nurture loyalty and optimize engagement, your online presence must build and nurture relationships as effectively as your most valued salesperson. Because customers expect to experience messaging continuity at every touchpoint — online and in person — creating a clear, consistent and compelling corporate message is more important than ever before.
Providing a superior customer experience should be the focus of all marketing initiatives. Delivering on this expectation requires deliberate attention to how the corporate story is told across all digital and physical channels, paying special attention to context in order to enhance engagement. Contextual engagement optimizes the customer experience for specific touchpoints, without compromising consistency and convenience, by delivering messaging that is appropriate to the specific device and unique to the search habits of your website visitors.
As marketing and the customer experience continue to converge, the relationship between the CMO and CIO must also shift. To deliver a compelling and consistent customer experience, marketing must be in constant communication with IT, so as to capture the necessary insights to make appropriate shifts in content delivery and provide a superior omni-channel experience for customers.
In the age of the customer, marketers must hone their “listening’ skills and be highly adaptable to the insights IT can provide regarding customer behavior and content preferences while providing a clear, compelling and consistent corporate message that meets the contextual needs of customers.
