The world is changing, and
consumers no longer want marketing targeted towards the masses, but
personalized, custom communications, speaking to where they are within their journey
as a consumer, and communicated based on how, and through what mediums, they prefer
to be spoken to. As a recent AdAge article states, “Personalization is no
longer a feature – it’s an expectation.”
The article goes on to say
that “the future of marketing is, quite simply, the process of mapping and optimizing
journeys for customers.” The best marketers have stopped relying on the “destination”,
or in most cases, the sale, and instead shifted their thinking to focus on the “journey”
and what drove the customer to make that sale, and how they can replicate that
journey for future customers.
Previously, marketers were
expected to develop and distribute messaging, and hoped that some portion of
that messaging stuck enough to drive a sale. In today’s world, marketers are
expected to understand where consumers are coming from, the different types of
messaging different consumers would like to see, how the company should react
if a consumer chooses not to purchase, how to eventually drive the purchase,
how to thank the customer after the purchase to ensure they come back, and
basically everything in between. It is no wonder then that many are saying that
the Chief Marketing Officer should now be referred to instead as the Customer
Journey Officer.
The article also laid out
four questions that are fundamental to understanding the customer journey:
- Do you know your customers? - Customers expect to be connected with on a more personal level. By truly proving you know your customers, you can go from “a company that’s cool” to “a company that’s cool for me.”
- Do you know where they are in their journey? - Is this a former customer? A customer prospect? Do they interact with your company on your app or have they not yet downloaded the app? Knowing all this information helps ensure you can deliver highly targeted messaging.
- Do you have a strategy to move customers along in their journey? - Having all the right information is great, but if you don’t have a strategy surrounding how to use it, you may as well not even have the data. Your strategy should be mapped out across every touch-point, in every channel.
- Are you able to measure the business impact? - You should be able to see, at every point in the customer journey, how much closer they are to purchasing, and if a step is not adding any incremental lift, to use this data to adjust your strategy.
Having worked in the world of digital marketing, and having built campaigns around personalization, I have seen firsthand the value of mapping out a customer journey and delivering a highly customized marketing strategy. I really do believe that in the next few years all CMOs are going to start, or be forced to start, to think of themselves as a Customer Journey Officer.
Read the entire article on the Customer Journey Officer
here.
