Key Trend for 2015: The Customer Journey Moves to Center Stage
Leading marketers are beginning to harness sophisticated digital marketing automation technologies to support and accelerate the customer journey.
Leading marketers are beginning to harness sophisticated digital marketing automation technologies to support and accelerate the customer journey.
For marketing traditionalists, digital marketing technology is still primarily used for email, and each marketing channel, whether online or offline, remains siloed. Some marketers have become quite sophisticated in testing, personalization, and design, but for this more traditional group, digital marketing is still about batch-and-blast push emails focused on products, offers, and company news.
Today’s more “mainstream” marketers are harnessing marketing automation technologies and using their digital marketing platforms to increase efficiency and effectiveness – scheduling their emails out over time, using automation for projects like drip nurtures, or replicating campaigns for new events or product launches.
Leading marketers – the organizations pushing boundaries and driving significant business results – realize that great marketing entails helping prospects along in the customer journey. What makes a customer’s journey especially meaningful? Helpful content as a prospect moves through his or her buying experience and additional follow-up information to encourage lifetime loyalty.
From researching alternatives and planning a change to evaluating and comparing providers and selecting a solution, digital marketing can both orchestrate and support each of these stages. Several ingredients are necessary to support this new approach, including:
Once you have the ingredients in place described above, you can begin to implement a newly architected resource center. The resource center becomes central in this new approach to helping customers in their customer journey. Instead of just throwing out all the content you have ever created and putting that in a self-service resource center, the resource center provides a guided path to the right content at the right time based on and individual’s persona and buyer journey stage.
Automation and email can support the resource center by offering the appropriate content and encouraging re-engagement with the resource center. But this time, email and automation have evolved from one-off offers and push messages to rule-based behavioral messages that are in complete alignment with the customer journey.
Marketers that take the time to invest in buyer persona development, customer journey mapping, and next-generation digital resource centers based on implicitly derived profiles and buyer stages will lead their peers in 2015!