How can we align marketing, community relations programs, and brand values with those common goals?
❯❯ What programs can we execute that bring us together, online and offline, with our customers to further our common goals?
❯❯ What is the reputation for the retailers that distribute or sell our products and how could their reputation, positive and negative, potentially impact our reputation with customers and communities?
As customer expectations and demands change from generation to generation, so, too, does the nature of marketing campaigns in general. Changes we’ve seen recently include refocusing the marketing department to become the customer experience department.
Some businesses have even renamed their chief marketing officer (CMO) to a chief experience officer (CXO) and are replacing advertising campaigns with customer experience initiatives for both their online and offline worlds.
How is customer experience defined today? Customer experience is the entirety of interactions between a brand and a customer beginning with her first purchase to the end of her purchasing life cycle. Interactions take place during each step of the decision process, which includes the following:
❯❯ Problem or need identification: Consumers realize that they need to purchase a product to solve a problem or fill a need. For example, they need a good home computer.
❯❯ Discovery: Consumers conduct research and explore options for products that fit their need and decide on the functions and features they need. For example, should they buy a laptop, notebook, desktop, or tablet?
❯❯ Evaluation: After they’ve found options or product categories they want to purchase, consumers start to evaluate brands.
❯❯ Trial or purchase: After research, and engaging with various brand representatives online or in stores, consumers make a purchase.
❯❯ Confirmation and reassurance: Consumers gather information after the decision or purchase to reaffirm their choice was the right one. They read customer reviews, talk to others who chose the same product or brand they did, post decision on social media to get more validation, and so on.
❯❯ Assignment of loyalty: A brand experience doesn’t stop after the purchase. It continues as consumers use the product and access the resources available, such as customer service and technical support.
You must address all these decision steps in your marketing plan and customer experience strategy. The following sections walk you through how you can integrate each one into a concerted, mapped‐out marketing plan.
Guiding the decision process with customer experience planning
Charles Graves, mentor of author Jeanette McMurtry, offered this great piece of marketing advice: “Consumers don’t want to be sold; they want to be told.” In other words, they want to be told what is in their best interests so that they can make informed decisions. When marketers educate rather than sell, they become trusted partners, not just suppliers and vendors, which often leads to lifetime value and loyalty (discussed in detail in Chapter 16).
Education‐based marketing is not only a strong marketing communications strategy, but it is also a sound customer experience strategy. Providing guidance, decision support, and information for each step of a customer’s experience with your product and brand can help set you apart from the competition. Here are some customer experience activities that can help you succeed at this important task.
❯❯ Problem or need identification: If you’re selling computers, your plan may include white papers and educational materials for a content marketing plan that you execute online via social and digital channels. You can read more about this in Chapters 7 and 8.
❯❯ Discovery: If you’ve done your customer research as mapped out in Chapter 4, you know what matters most to consumers shopping for home computers today, and you likely know how involved the decision process is. You can tap into this stage of the decision process by creating how‐to guides or checklists to help consumers make wise choices and posting links to those guides on social media ads (discussed in Chapter 8) and direct marketing initiatives (outlined in Chapter 10).
❯❯ Evaluation: You can increase support for your brand and product line by engaging influencer marketing so that others are endorsing your products and validating your claims. We cover tips for content that you can share via influencers, such as bloggers and media writers, in Chapter 7. You can also engage in emotional selling practices to get prospective buyers to recognize the emotional or personal outcomes you offer, which are known to secure sales for both B2B and B2C. Tactics for emotional selling propositions (ESPs) are outlined in Chapter 16.
❯❯ Purchase: After you’ve secured a purchase, your job isn’t done. You need to continue to communicate your emotional and functional value and invite customers to engage with you on a great journey through the communities you build and causes you support. You’ve read about this already in this chapter and can get more information on how to do this in Chapter 5 on marketing plans and Chapter 12 on building brand communities and hives to which customers want to align.
❯❯ Confirmation, reassurance, and loyalty: Again, building hives or communities is critical here as well. Sending customers thank‐you notes, inviting them to join VIP programs for rewards, and sending them digital games to play that reward them as well are all key marketing tactics to create loyalty and capture lifetime value. We discuss these programs in Chapter 8.
Creating powerful experiences beyond the sales process
Customer experiences clearly start with the sales process, as outlined earlier in this chapter, but your marketing plan must address a bigger journey after you close the sale that builds loyalty, referrals, and of course captures lifetime value. As part of your customer experience strategy, you need to map out your customer’s journey or the steps necessary from first sale to lifetime value that you need to address.
Again, a customer’s journey encompasses the steps you must take and deliver upon at every touch point. For example:
❯❯ How do you thank or recognize customers for their purchases?
❯❯ How do you resolve conflict when you’re right or wrong?
❯❯ How do you validate customers’ decisions to continue purchasing from you?
❯❯ How do you reward them for loyalty and referrals?
❯❯ How do you engage them in meaningful activities, causes, and so on?
The purpose of a customer journey is to build and maintain emotional bonds with your brand and get customers to refer others. To do this most effectively for your brand,
