THE NEW NORMAL IS NON-LINEAR.
Buyers in today’s world are in charge. Customers no longer follow a linear customer journey path with a defined start, middle, and end due to the abundance of information available on the internet and the opportunity to communicate with practically everyone on the planet.
Because today’s clients are never on a predetermined path – they are entirely unpredictable – this updated buying process causes people to bounce back and forth between advertisements, forums, social networking sites, emails, blogs, and so on. This is a good thing because brands that strive to control the customer experience to understand and harness it run the danger of capturing and losing customers.
Every consumer is unique, with their own set of needs, wants, preferences, and patterns of behavior. Customers must be seen as people by brands, and each relationship must be unique. The voyage is now in constant motion in the current day, with the course firmly in the hands of the clients. A brand can start to build genuine relationships and become more relevant in the modern, multi-channel environment by making this shift.
APPRECIATE THE GIANT OPPORTUNITIES OF OMNICHANNEL MARKETING
Multi-chain means spreading your customer service efforts across multiple platforms, which can be a complex undertaking. Consider this an opportunity for companies to emerge as industry leaders in terms of innovation and customer service by following the consumer’s path to purchase and adapting your product or service messages for maximum commitment and effect. A brand’s availability and versatility can frequently reveal more about it than the products or services it provides.
In the buyer’s journey, the customer has taken the steering wheel. Brands that were once able to establish a client journey and even sketch it out linearly on their websites now face a new reality. They don’t have the power to control how a consumer interacts with them any longer. In today’s market, the customer is in charge, and brands are merely passengers. Here are a few instances that demonstrate what we mean:
With ZuuKeeper, an auto dealer customer added an online video to their digital marketing mix and noticed a 10% reduction in the number of touchpoints required to convert.
When a state college introduced OTT to the mix, the average time for a user to convert was cut in half.
An e-commerce client that wanted to try native advertising saw a 15% boost in overall sales.
What exactly does this imply? It means that because every business and client is unique, you should constantly be changing and experimenting to see what your audience responds to the most. Experiment with different mediums, campaign types, creative types, budget allocations, and targeting possibilities, among other things.
Customer Interactions Must Evolve
Customers are well aware that if one company does not engage with them on their terms, when and when they want, another will. Customers will not discriminate between brands that offer Twitter as a way of customer support and those that solely use it as a ‘broadcast’ platform because all brands are on a level playing field.
So, how do you create a multi-channel strategy when a customer’s interaction may span departments and channels, with the consumer having the ability to stop and start anytime they want?
Create a positive experience – It is crucial and necessary to have a positive experience. Change is coming to stay, and it must be accepted. Attributing costs to individual channels is becoming an outdated way of thinking, which can lead to poor decision-making and wasteful resource allocation. If marketers want to attract (and keep) ideal customers, they must look large picture and long term.
Select the appropriate partner(s) – Many digital marketing suppliers, including some so-called programmatic vendors, claim to be diversified in their media buying strategies when in reality, they are merely white labeling or utilizing on DSP. Using a single DSP is not an agnostic method that will help you to reach your audience across several platforms and at various times. As a result, you need to be cautious when looking for a partner like ZuuKeeper that can bring in all available impressions on all platforms via various DSPs, SSPs, and private deals, allowing you to be non-linear in your marketing strategy truly.
The old paradigm has changed and is still evolving. Many brands are being left behind as a result of the strain exerted by omni-channel innovations. While many claim that technology improvements are causing this transformation, it is much more than that we have constant access to the internet on our phones. Multi-channel is just a term used to describe a method of satisfying modern client demands. You’ll be putting customer-centric thinking at the center of each channel’s strategy by taking this approach.
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC JOURNEYS PAVES THE WAY
The typical customer journey is gradually becoming obsolete. You must realize the changes in the digital marketing landscape and the importance of non-linear client journeys to keep up with your competition. Above all, remember that it is a never-ending and ongoing process. Once a customer converts, your relationship with them does not stop. If you’ve done your marketing right, that’s only the start of a long and fruitful customer journey that can go on indefinitely as long as your brand evolves to match consumer wants.
