Never have we been more enabled to be as self-obsessed. In an age of the quantified self, dynamic re-targeting and UX personalisation, it’s no wonder consumers expect a highly customised brand experience.
Brands need to consider this across the entire path to purchase and beyond. This includes tailoring via product development, service delivery, retail experience as well as the basics such as communicating with people.
Marketers across the world concur according to the Salesforce 2015 State of Marketing Report. In it’s second outing, Salesforce surveyed 5,000 marketers globally to measure current priorities across all digital changes. However you feel about Salesforce, they’re big enough numbers to sit up and listen.
So whilst we were heartened to find that the vast majority of respondents at 84% said they planned to increase or maintain marketing budgets for 2015, we were excited about the huge shift from campaign-focused mass marketing to personalised, one-to-one journeys since 2014.
“86% of senior-level marketers say that it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey.” (2015 State of Marketing Report). The good news is that this appears to be more than empty rhetoric with many citing key shifts in their approach including analytics and CRM to help achieve seamless customer experiences.
The report states that mobile apps (57%), marketing analytics (54%) and customer relationship management tools (54%) are believed to be the most effective technologies for creating a cohesive customer journey. And we couldn’t agree more.The shift in importance to marketers has grown over 100% in the past 12 months and holds true for Australian marketers if not to a greater extent.
So when we consider traditional lifecycle marketing approaches and crude persona segmentation, we realise that whilst still useful techniques, on their own they lack the granularity and finesse now required.
Today’s marketers need to view consumers as individuals, as unique people with unique behaviour. With access to behaviour based data available to every brand, we now have the opportunity to see their interactions, their profiles and personalise their experience with your brand based on their response and preferences.
The age of the single brand view is as thrilling as it is daunting, but is undoubtedly the future of marketing. So stop shouting the same stuff to everyone and think about having quiet, meaningful conversations with individual people and watch your brand transform.
