Make Customer Experience The Heart Of Internet Marketing With Ektron
If customer experience is a new concept for you as a marketer, think of it as the overall experience a customer has with a particular business, from their discovery and awareness of the brand, all the way through their interaction, purchase, use, and even advocacy of that brand. In today’s wired world, chances are good that the relationship you have with your customers is going to include one or more digital channels -- your website, landing pages, email communications, mobile interactions, social media participation, etc. That is the increasingly important subset of customer experience management, something called "Digital Experience Management." In other words, customer experience is way more than just a friendly voice on the phone.
How Marketers Can "Be" Their Customers
Be Relevant - Creating relevant marketing requires an understanding of your customers so that you can present them with the right content, at the right time, so they convert and take the next step with your company. And being relevant requires a deep understanding of not just your buyer persona, but the customer journey -- from how future customers find you, to how you sell and market to them, to how you support and service them when they are finally a customer of yours. Relevancy is the backbone of any successful company.
Be Consistent - Today, most marketing is organized around specific digital channels -- web marketing, email marketing, social media marketing. But your customers do not see these as marketing channels like you do; they only see your company. Marketers must put the customer at the center of their focus, designing a consistent experience for them that bridges across channels.
Be Iterative - When marketers think about analytics, they most often think about web analytics, which provides a high level view of website performance against general metrics like page views, unique visitors, and bounce rates. But marketers thinking about digital customer experience need to be more focused on measuring and optimizing business outcomes, like leads, donations, downloads, and registrations. Marketing analytics provides insight into the metrics that move the needle on the website and tie investments to the ultimate goal for most companies -- generating revenue.
Creating an Excellent Customer Experience on Social Media
If you build it, they will come. Except with social media, they will come whether you have built it or not. That is why smart marketers are taking control of their social media presence, and finding exciting new ways to engage with prospects and customers. Here is how you can always keep the customer in mind when managing your social media presence.
Be Relevant - Stephen Covey once said, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood." This is especially true in social media, where to be relevant you must first find the places where conversations are happening about your company or solution. Then, you can engage by providing relevant content. In other words, don't spend your time on Facebook if your audience is on Quora and LinkedIn. And once you find that audience, take the time to listen to what they want and become a trusted member of the community -- and that can only happen by providing relevant, helpful content on a consistent basis.
Be Consistent - Integrate your social media presence across all your marketing channels. If someone's following your company on Facebook, for example, there's a good chance they already are, or will soon be, opted in to receive email communications from you. Or read your blog. Or follow your company on LinkedIn. That means if you're not including social share and follow buttons across all of your marketing channels -- even your other social media channels to promote your other accounts -- you're missing a huge opportunity to create an integrated experience for your customers.
Be Iterative - Close the loop on social media marketing by monitoring the ROI around your social media activities. Most marketers know they "should" be on social media ... they're just not totally sure what they're doing there. If you use closed-loop marketing software, however, you can see exactly how effective your efforts are, by tracking what content on which social networks drives traffic, leads, and customers.
Now to make all these initiative successful you have to rely on a reputed content management system like Ektron. For ultimate digital marketing experience, you can combine Ektron CMS with various other product solutions and create some business impact.