If you’re a marketer, predicting and influencing customer behavior is top of mind. The buyer personas you create, the content you produce, the ads you promote, the landing pages you publish, and the emails you send serve a single purpose—persuading prospective customers to act while trying to determine and be ready for the next move they make.
This means that you need to know what motivates your visitors in the present and the future so you can guide them through a customer journey. So, what can help you get there? Read on for the answer to this question and get to discover your new best marketing friend.
Customer experience is king, but there’s also a queen
How customers feel about your brand and why they choose you over your competition both rest on the quality of their experiences. Therefore, you want to understand them so you can create the perfect customer experience (CX) for them before, during, and after they make a purchase. That’s why, at experience.com, we define CX as every component of the customer journey, from the moment someone is introduced to your brand, all the way to a transaction, and every moment that happens post-transaction.
Marketing is key to starting consumers on this journey and is responsible for delivering on-target campaigns and messaging, successful product and service launches, and positive sentiment about your brand. Marketing also needs to know how customers think, feel, and behave in order to design programs that increase leads and build pipelines.
But CX isn’t everything. There’s the flip side of CX—employee experience (EX). Employees also contribute to the customer journey through customer service, social media, and other promotional activities. Marketing messaging and communications also play a key role in employee experience programs. Marketing content guides how brands talk to their workforce and how their workforce communicates to customers. So, extraordinary CX needs extraordinary EX to build the perfect journey. Experience management can help..
How experience management helps marketing
Experience management collects feedback at every meaningful moment of a customer’s and employee’s journey. Marketing can analyze that feedback and use the insights to implement programs that turn visitors into prospects and prospects into customers while strengthening your brand, increasing customer loyalty and retention, and more. You are probably aware of the advantages of experience management in areas of your company like customer success.
What you might not know is just how much experience management can help you in your marketing role. It can help you create an excellent experience for customers and employees. How? Check out these 5 reasons why experience management is a marketer’s best friend.
1. Build feedback into your marketing strategy
Customer feedback is an excellent way of making sure your customer journeys are on the right track. Experience engagement allows you to instantly and regularly capture feedback from customers and employees. Analytics tell you how people actually engage with your company today and help predict what customer engagement will look like tomorrow. You can even collect and analyze data from social media and the web to identify potential buying trends before they happen.You can use all these insights to inform your marketing strategy.
2. Let your most loyal customers boost marketing efforts
These days, customers are increasingly sophisticated and less likely to react to traditional marketing techniques. One area remains a very powerful and cost-effective weapon: word of mouth and influencer marketing. Customer advocates help build your business for virtually no expense. Experience management helps you identify, nurture and reward your customer advocates. It also offers you the data and tools for creating an ambassador program or customer champions who are willing to participate and even host marketing events that generate leads.
3. Be more searchable and findable online
Customers with great experiences are asked to share their feedback by creating new reviews about your individual employees, locations, or overall brand. Employees are also offered similar opportunities on job and career websites. New reviews are a key way to build brand credibility and help improve your Google search results. Because customer and employee journeys start with an online search, you want them to find you—and accurate data—when they search. With experience management, you can publish consistent data across social, career, and directory sites, which in turn supports search algorithms and moves your company up the Google search results.
4. Deliver personalized engagement
Experience management provides in-depth data analysis you can use to quickly establish the behaviors and interests of customers and employees. Because it provides a better understanding of your customers and employees, you can plan and implement improved customer engagement based on the actual requirements of each individual. You can even scale your interactions so that you can send one or thousands of personalized conversations–and anywhere in between–in real-time.
5. Collect feedback and deliver improved experiences across channels
Customers and employees use many different ways to connect—websites, email, social media, mobile apps, phone and more—and they want that experience to be consistent. They expect to interact with your company however and whenever they want. Experience management enables you to offer ways for them to share and for you to collect feedback across these channels for a holistic view of their interactions. You can then make sure that you focus your marketing communications and content plans to include seamless, consistent omnichannel engagement when trying to reach people.
XMP and you: The beginning of a beautiful friendship
Ready to ensure you get the most out of customer feedback so you can build your leads and pipeline? Experience.com offers our Experience Management Platform (XMP), which automatically captures and analyzes the voices of your customers and employees. It provides the insights you need to understand how they feel about your brand at every point of their journey, so you can drive lead generation and customer retention.
