Marketing trends that began a few years ago can no longer be ignored. Looking back over the past several months, it’s become increasingly clear that:
1. The customer is in charge. You can manage the customer relationship, but don’t waste resources trying to control it. Done right, marketing creates interactions that foster a greater understanding of the uniqueness of each individual’s needs and desires. That means your job is to captivate, not control.
2.“Traditional” customers are just as demanding as millennials. As I mentioned last month, my mom is a grandparent who, at times, shops like a millennial. She’s not 100% brick and mortar. She’s not 100% digital. But regardless of where or how she shops, she expects individualized customer service. My mom is a great reminder that consumers across all demographics are now more demanding. If you don’t engage, you’ll lose – and not just millennials, but more traditional shoppers, too.
3. Marketers need to choreograph a conversation across multiple diverse channels. Let’s say you send customers an initial piece of collateral by direct mail. When one of those customers comes into the store, you need to pick up that same conversation. You need to know what offers have been presented, what drove them into the store. Then, after the sale, you need to have follow-up dialogue – maybe by email or social media – to keep the conversation going. The marketing applications you’re using have to enable the brand to carry on a seamless conversation across multiple touchpoints and channels.
4. Engagement must be appropriately paced at the rate of the individual. As I’ve outlined in #1-3 above, marketing success requires engagement, but that engagement must be delivered when it’s most meaningful. You can’t just blast out a message and expect all of your customers to be at the same place on the experience curve. Instead, you need to be responsive to your customers as individuals. Each one wants to be part of the dialogue at their own pace.
How can you best respond to changes like these and create the kind of marketing campaigns that drive revenue? I suggest you observe what I call “the four essential truths of real-time customer engagement.” Namely:
- If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it’s almost impossible to be relevant.
- If you’re not managing the journey your customer is on, someone else is.
- If you can’t decide which of your offers are most appropriate, you can’t expect your customer to do it for you.
- If you can’t get your message delivered at the right time, it doesn’t really matter how good it is.
More to help me remember them than anything else, I made up a relatively simple mnemonic. In short, you need to:
…and if you follow those links, you’ll find a blog post that goes into detail about each one.
It’s December, the season for thinking ahead and planning for the New Year. If your company is prepared, you’ll be able to withstand – and even embrace – all that’s evolving, while maintaining your competitive edge. For more about how you can adapt to changing consumer behaviors, check out the interview we recently streamed over Periscope.
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