Marketing is a complicated business. There are more digital channels than ever before and keeping up with customers is getting more difficult each day. Every one of them behaves differently and marketers need to understand how to speak to each one as an individual, not as an audience. When you look at how fast the digital universe is expanding (doubling in size every two years according to IDC) and realise that there are now over 400 marketing metrics to try measure it, it’s no wonder that many marketers feel over-whelmed.
I watched a presentation recently of a large footwear retailer, and they explained how they have identified 800 different customers journeys. Eight hundred! It makes you wonder; How are marketers supposed to speak to their customers “at scale”, when they not only have millions of customers to look after, but hundreds of different customer journeys to manage as well?
Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler
- Albert Einstein.
The higher up the leadership ladder you go though, the simpler the thinking seems to be. When I speak to executives about the challenges that they are really facing, I often just hear slightly different variations of the same answer; “We just want to get closer to our customers”. An IBM CMO study in 2013 discovered the same thing, suggesting that “88% of business leaders said being closer to their customers was the top priority for realising their strategy over the next five years”.
The more I think about it though, the more I think that the job of a marketer doesn’t have to be that complicated at all. As a strategist I love to simplify things, so I liked this quote I heard recently from author Milan Kundera, “Business has only two functions; marketing and innovation”. I was discussing the simplicity of the quote with my marketing friends and their response was “Marketing can be described simply too, since it really only exists to do two things; make money and/or save money”. I think that’s perhaps too simplistic a view but both statements provide a valid perspective.
In my experience, the most successful marketers are the ones who simplify things enough to be able to make quick decisions and communicate them efficiently, but not so simple that they overlook important insights. A great example of this, and one of the most elegant solutions for communicating a brand’s mission is this simple “one sentence business model”. Try filling it in for your own organisation ~ it’s not as simple as it looks.
So…. You want to be a successful marketer and getting closer to your customers is now your number one objective, how can you do that? I would recommend that you start by looking at building customer journeys. The simple reason we built journey builder was to help brands get closer to their customers. No matter how many people you serve, or how many devices they use, or how complicated their buying journey is; journey builder uses a simple interface to help make very complicated tasks, quick and easy to execute.
The UI for journey maps even looks like a white board, making it a pleasant experience when you are planning your next award winning campaign, but don’t let it’s looks fool you. Behind the attractive interface lies a huge code base, pulling all the relevant and accurate data about your customers, in real-time, to help you serve your customers with the right message at the right time.
Journey Builder helps you do the four things that marketers need to do really well, in order to get closer to their customers and deliver results for their business;
- Plan the journey across the lifecycle.
- Drive demand for your products.
- Engage and nurture customers to drive utilisation and loyalty.
- Optimise every interaction for best results.
Customers like Fitbit, the market leader in wearable technology, are already using journey builder to help them reach their millions of customers faster than ever before. The more I speak to customers and listen to their challenges, the more I believe that marketing success in 2015 will centre around the way that brands manage customer journeys.
P.S. I don’t usually write product posts, but I hope you’ll forgive me on this occasion, because I believe that technology like this means that marketers don’t need to feel overwhelmed or under-prepared. They can be excited about meeting their challenges head on.
As a company that has been serving marketers for many years, we just want to make your job as simple as possible, without compromising any of the marketing technology that you need to be a world-class brand. Check out this demo to get some more ideas about how we can help you to be a customer company.
