Delivering and exceeding customer expectation should be the key focus of all brands. According to Forrester, focusing on delighting customers can generate 9x as much revenue than just fixing customer experience issues. But the reality of customer experience goes far beyond revenue, as brands are becoming more ‘disposable’ than ever. Consumers have significantly more power through their volume of choice and speed of access, so brands simply can’t afford to lose any customers to their competitors.
Every day consumers are exposed to new channels, all of which require new and different types of content to be created and deployed. Marketers and brand managers are being asked to do more but doing more and achieving more are two different objectives.
But what does a good brand experience mean and how do you achieve it?
Every touch point that consumers interact with during their purchasing journey is an experience. Successful brands will ensure the sum of all these experiences is consistent and cohesive with all the different channels working in harmony together to deliver their brand message and ultimately improve their brand performance.
What a customer sees and experiences while interacting with a brand will shape their purchasing behaviour. According to Salesforce, 57% of customers stopped buying from a brand because a competitor provided a better customer experience, and 67% were willing to pay more for great service.
What are the steps that brands today can take to improve their customer experience and ensure they’re outperforming their competition? Here are three steps to creating a more cohesive brand experience.
1. Know your customers.
How well do you truly know your customers? To simply know your demographic split is not enough anymore. To create a better customer experience and journey, brands need to start understanding not only who is buying, but what are their behaviours and personalities, and in what ways are they shopping, interacting, and communicating with your brand? Answering these questions will better inform what you are telling your customers across your brand’s various channels of communication.
2. Break down silos.
One of the biggest challenges to creating a cohesive brand experience is breaking down the silos between the different channels within an organisation. Many of the big brands continue to work in a multi-channel approach driven by the brand needs and motivation (the push) versus what the customer needs (the pull).
Content has been traditionally thought of tactically, creating deliverables for a specific campaign or product and the notion of creating reusable content that can be available for multiple channels is not executed as well as it could be or not at all.
3. Rethink the approach to content creation.
By seeking to truly understand the customer journey and how they interact with your brand and the personas that those customers have, you can start to think about the best way to talk to them along each stage of that journey.
In conjunction with that, by removing those silos, unlocking those hidden factories and creating a more coordinated and structured team of content creators you can start to think about your content strategy in a way that is based on what you know about your customers and tailor the brand experience accordingly.
By creating a cohesive brand experience, your brand will not only benefit from an enhanced customer experience and improved customer loyalty, but internal organisational functions will also derive benefits. With a reduction in duplicated efforts, a consolidation of processes, and a maximised usage of available assets, your brand will be better able to maintain brand integrity and consistency long-term.
As brand owners as well as consumers, we all have no doubt experienced moments of frustration, moments of delight, and many other emotions in between. The question is, which of these experiences are you creating for your customers? Are you getting the right content, in the right format, at the right place, at the right time to drive the right experience? If you are unsure, there is ample opportunity to review and reset your approach to your content strategy.
