In our last post, we talked about Customer Experience Marketing and gave examples of how clients have used it to advance their brands. To recap briefly, Customer Experience Marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on how your customers feel about their experience with your brand. It’s especially effective for marketers targeting a particular client segment or trouble-shooting downward trends in marketing conversions. How can you incorporate Customer Experience Marketing into your marketing strategy?

Identify the high-level problem that could be impacting marketing strategy.

Even though you’re not the operations manager, if sales are down, new customer conversions are low, reviews are trending downward, or high-level executives are making assumptions about why a location is not achieving a particular goal, as a marketer, you have a good reason to look deeper at the issue. You can recommend scheduling a customer experience journey.

Complete a Customer Experience Journey.

A customer experience journey is a roadmap or workflow sketch that shows the customer’s experience with the brand from start to finish. It could be completed by a marketing account executive or an account planner. You can document the workflow by talking to managers, pretending to be a customer, testing the top conversion sources (phone numbers, online forms, etc.), noting trends in online reviews, and simply having conversations. The process isn’t meant to be conclusive about every customer’s experience at every point in the day but to give a good idea of the customer experience and identify definite snags you ran into during your research. Don’t be afraid of still having unanswered questions at the end of the process. Those questions may help you identify where additional research is needed (such as a Target Audience Profile based on census data OR a Customer Experience Journey based on customer interviews) or give you the perfect questions for a customer survey.

Get graphic design help.

Unless you’re savvy with Canva, enlist the help of your graphic design team to make your findings look concise and pretty. If you give them the chance, they can work magic on making your data easier to understand and more impacting when you present it!

Presenting the Findings.

Remember that high-level executives think their staff are following a certain workflow, but customers may be experiencing a very different process. Try informally screensharing the workflow with someone who is lower level within the company to confirm you’ve properly identified the actual experience. That way, when you give the presentation, you have someone backing you up internally. When you’re ready to present your findings to a high-level executive, avoid sending them via email. An email is likely to sit in an inbox and never get developed into a real action plan to address issues. Instead, present the findings in person or, at the very least, via a screen share call. Make sure to emphasize the gaps you identified in your Customer Experience Journey so you can move the conversation toward recommended solutions.

Present Recommended Solutions.

This is where you get to have fun! You now have primary data to support recommendations for new strategic projects, completing more research/surveys, developing a marketing action plan, planning a budget for next year, adjusting your overall marketing strategy, and pinpointing a practical solution for each identified issue.

Woohoo! There you have it: a basic outline of how to use Customer Experience Marketing to leverage your brand. Feel free to contact us with any questions, and we hope you have as much fun with this tool as we do!