Managing different channels for marketing, sales and service effectively is a challenge. Your desire, of course, is that communications are mutually reinforcing and well connected every time your customer interacts with them. But that's no easy task. Therefore, take advantage of these 6 current developments, for an optimal customer journey.
Focus on the buying process rather than the selling process
Operceptive companies are continually pushed to embrace changing technology and new ways customers interact. More specifically, in mature markets, the emphasis is shifting from purely sales-driven communications to an approach that addresses how those sales are generated and service is provided throughout the customer journey. As a result, marketers are not only expected to take responsibility over the customer lifecycle, but also to coordinate more channels and types of campaigns.
Complications during the customer journey - or customer search?
Research by McKinsey& Company shows that a B2B purchase uses an average of six different channels during the decision process and that nearly 65% are frustrated by inconsistent experiences.You hope, of course, that your communication efforts reinforce each other and fit each customer stage - at the very least, you don't want your communication to contradict itself. The individual contacts might not even be called a customer journey anymore, but are by necessity a customer quest, a search in other words (often literally). What's an additional challenge for marketers is that customers often don't even know the next point of interaction. Forrester visualizes the complexity nicely with what is almost a mosaic of channels intersecting.The question is not only how customer behavior is changing, the more important question is how the organization evolves in it with its marketing and sales efforts. How do we adapt as customer behaviors change?
Invest in multichannel campaign management (MCCM) software
Ideally, a company has a multi-/omnichannel contact strategy implemented across the board: mobile apps, new social media channels being introduced, predictive intelligence and big data initiatives. They may mean the edge of the future for some organizations. Others, on the contrary, are better off focusing on the current, deliberate, set of touchpoints.Gartner expects spending on MCCM marketing software to be more than $6 billion in 2015 and to continue to grow almost 24% annually through 2018. This growth comes in part from the concentration of marketing and customer touchpoints around online channels (and online marketing). In addition, advanced tools provide opportunities to add content and substance to terms such as inbound marketing, retargetting, real-time marketing and data-driven marketing.
"Expenditures on MCCM marketing software will exceed $6 billion in 2015 and continue to grow annually by nearly 24% through 2018."
