Customer experience should lead your marketing strategy, and we’ve got a few methods to do that. But first, it’s crucial to understand why customer experience is essential and the benefits of prioritizing it in a marketing strategy.
Why is Customer Experience Important?
Various statistics prove how valuable a solid customer experience is to a business, but here’s one that stands out: “77% of consumers say inefficient customer experiences detract from their quality of life.”
Providing your customers with a positive, pleasant experience with your brand doesn’t just better your business. Instead, it can be a contributing factor in ensuring your customers live better. In other words, you have an opportunity to provide an experience with your brand that enables people to navigate challenges better and thrive.
Additionally, prioritizing customer experience is vital in general, but its impact on marketing can be mighty.
What are the Benefits of Prioritizing Customer Experience in Marketing?
Marketing is a massive part of your customer’s overall experience with your brand. Bombarding your customers with irrelevant content, misusing their data for personalization, or aggressively pushing your products/services on them isn’t conducive to a good customer experience.
But taking the time to get to know your customers and producing content that they can emotionally connect with and use is. In addition, prioritizing customer experience in marketing ensures profit doesn’t come before people. All in all, you’ll be more likely to create brand loyalty through marketing if you put the customer experience first.
With the importance of customer experience and why it should be a priority in your marketing plans, let’s look at some strategies for putting it at the forefront of your marketing efforts.
Three Strategies for Putting Customer Experience First
The next step is letting customer experience lead in your marketing strategy. Here are three ways to start doing so today.
Ensure All of Your Teams are on the Same Page
When you’re strategizing about creating the best experience for your customers, all of your teams should be involved. Your sales, marketing, and customer service teams should all be on the same page regarding what kind of experience you want to provide your customers and how each of their efforts can reflect it.
Additionally, you should include design and development teams in the strategizing process. They can create software design documents that detail how the envisioned customer experience is supported in their projects. You can compare them to your marketing plans and those plans in your other departments to ensure all of your touchpoints are customer-centric.
Keeping everyone on the same page also helps you prioritize consistency.
Prioritize Consistency
Your customer’s experience should be consistent on every platform they engage with your brand on. Without consistency, design and workflows differ from page to page, and the customer experience becomes confusing and unpleasant.
Instead, create a clearly defined design system that helps you manage customer experience. In other words, create a universal standard for your customer experience you can use company-wide.
You can weigh all of your marketing content and the techniques you use against this standard to build a solid line of communication and genuine connection between you and your target audience no matter where they encounter your brand.
Lastly, you can use data about your customer experience to make informed decisions about your marketing strategy.
Leverage Data
Successful marketing is highly dependent on what you know about your customers and how they’re interacting with your brand. For example, let’s say you know your customers are regular social media users, and they’re interacting with your brand the most on Instagram. You can then refocus your social media marketing strategy to that platform to get the most out of your efforts.
The best way to collect the amount of data you need with a high level of accuracy is through data analytics software. Data-driven decision-making helps you make more effective changes to your marketing strategy because those changes are rooted in actual data about your customers. Instead of assuming what customers want out of their experience, let data tell you what they want and need in their interaction with your business.
Ultimately, your marketing strategy is more impactful when you collect, analyze, and leverage key data about your customers to make changes that better the results of your efforts.
Conclusion
Your customers mean so much to your business. Without their long-term loyalty, your company’s success will be short-lived. Therefore, your customer must remain at the forefront of everything you do in your business, especially your marketing strategy. Implement the above three strategies to ensure you’re letting your customer experience lead your marketing efforts.
