Why 2022 is the year to perfect customer service
Econsultancy’s Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: 2022 Digital Trends polled B2B marketers, and the results indicated that content marketing and customer experience are the two prospects that are the most interesting for the next year. Our attention at Digital Marketing NOW has been particularly drawn to the connection that exists between these two different chances.
The majority of B2B marketers (42%) consider content marketing to be one of their top three objectives for 2022 since it is the most effective method for acquiring new clients and maintaining relationships with current ones. Your content is a reflection of your brand and produces value throughout the customer experience, which in turn creates value for your bottom line.
If you want to grow your business, focus on creating valuable content. “Improving the customer experience must be the persistent emphasis of contemporary marketing,” as stated in one of the core principles of Econsultancy’s Modern Marketing Manifesto, and we couldn’t agree more with this sentiment!
Therefore, the most important aspect of your content marketing efforts is not the amount of content that you produce, the number of content formats that you develop, or the number of bylined articles that you get published; rather, it is the effect that your content marketing has on the experience that customers have in general. Send it out over Twitter!
Good Customer Experience is Valuable
There is no denying the importance of providing a positive customer experience (CX) when it comes to maintaining and expanding a solid and devoted consumer base. Seventy-three percent of businesses are in agreement that they can no longer afford to have inconsistent message across numerous platforms since doing so puts their customers in danger of having a negative experience.
The fact that marketing is not the only department that must be responsible for developing a consistent and cohesive experience across all channels makes the work more difficult. Every customer touch point needs to be aligned, including events, products, services, hardware, software, customer service, tech support, company website, advertising, email messaging, and content management.
This requires a company-wide commitment to delivering interactions with customers that are consistently simple, relevant, and pleasurable. Keep in mind that at the end of the day, there is only one boss you need to satisfy, and that is the client. In light of this, it is essential to triumph over any office politics and internal empire-building in order to ensure that the client is the primary focus.
Difference Between Traditional & Digital Marketing
However, there is a widespread divergence of opinion among businesses over whether or not there should be a difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing, which is preventing many businesses from providing their customers with a completely integrated experience.
At Iscope Digital, we often explain to our customers that from the perspective of the consumer, the concept of a “marketing channel” does not exist. There is no such thing as being “offline” or “online.” Customers couldn’t care less whether they are looking at your display ad or your billboard when it comes to making a purchase decision.
The only thing that a consumer sees, feels, hears, and remembers is their experience as a client. Period. The end of the tale! Only 36 percent of marketers feel that all marketing is now digital and that the term “digital marketing” is becoming more irrelevant (Tweet this!). Only 36 percent of marketers agree that all marketing is now digital.
On the other hand, if online and offline marketing are seen as two distinct disciplines, then it is impossible for marketers to provide a unified and consistent experience for customers across all of their contact points. It is surprising that only half of the businesses surveyed believe that using online data to optimize the offline experience will play a “very important” role in their digital marketing over the next few years.
Forty-two percent of those surveyed believe the opposite, namely that using offline data to optimize the online experience will play a more significant role.
These are ridiculously low figures in our opinion. Why do the percentages not add up to 100 percent? Why on earth would you approach the two events as if they were completely separate and unconnected to one another? Why wouldn’t you make use of the data that is readily accessible to enhance the overall quality of the consumer experience, independent of the marketing channel or location?
It is quite unlikely that a potential buyer would convince themselves, when engaging with IBM, Accenture, or Salesforce.com, that “well, this is an offline marketing vehicle therefore I really don’t care if their message is antithetical to what I just read online.” They will most likely be perplexed, will quickly lose faith in you, and will look for alternate answers.
Why is it that businesses have such a hard time grasping this concept?
Both physical and online encounters should be seen as equivalent components of a cohesive customer experience strategy. When you remove the online and offline components, all that is left is raw consumer data and a single plane on which to communicate with your audience.
Our recommendation is to do away with the distinctions between digital and traditional methods of marketing and to instead focus on outlining a straightforward strategy for bringing the customer experience to life across all channels, including print and display advertising, electronic newsletters and customer calls, live events and virtual tweet-ups.
Mobile First is the Trend of the Future
Naturally, any good customer-driven strategy should now include content that is optimized for mobile devices. How could it possibly not be? Whatever the customer wants, the customer gets! should be reason enough, but newer, faster, and better technologies are making it more appealing than ever before for marketers to embrace responsive design, location-based services, and geo-targeted advertising in order to ensure a more seamless customer experience (CX).
However, just 17% of B2B marketers mention “mobile optimization” as one of their top three digital goals in 2022, despite the fact that 28% of organizations already report that more than half of their online visitors are through mobile devices (65% anticipate to see 50/50 mobile traffic by 2023)
Again, keep the client in mind, who may just be unaware of the distinctions between online and offline, mobile, tablet, and laptop shopping, and so on. It is essential that you provide experiences that do not have any specifics outlined.
The conclusion is as follows: In 2022, the primary emphasis will be placed on the customer experience as well as content marketing. Where do you place the most importance on things? To put it another way, what are the priorities of your customers, and how do your priorities fit with theirs?
