Download Get started with Experience Marketing

Get started with Experience Marketing
Overcome the barriers to owning the customer experience
ebook // Get started with Experience Marketing
Marketing owns the experience
Successful brands don’t deliver just products and services; they also
deliver experiences that people really value. And increasingly, customers
expect brands to be able to provide personalized, contextual experiences
whenever they want, at any touchpoint. Designing and delivering such
experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from the first
time a consumer interacts with a brand through to a continuing lifetime
relationship, is the job of the modern marketer. At Sitecore®, we’ve
pioneered this concept, called Experience Marketing.
Adopting Experience Marketing means doing away with one-way, onesize-fits-all, mass marketing tactics and also moving on from the digital
marketing era—in which marketers focused on point-by-point, channelfocused experiences—and, instead, enabling unique, value-generating
experiences that delight each customer whenever and wherever
that person interacts with your brand. By its very nature, Experience
Marketing requires a granular understanding of all your customers and
your business, along with continuous planned and responsive execution,
at a scale and with a level of accuracy you never thought possible.
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ebook // Get started with Experience Marketing
If the concept of Experience Marketing sounds daunting, consider
this: every single interaction a customer currently has with your
brand creates an experience. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re
delivering experiences already—possibly millions of them every
day. But do you know what kind of experience you are providing on
an individual basis? Is it the experience your customer wants and
expects? Does every experience deliver value for your business as well
as your customer? These are the questions that Experience Marketing,
as a discipline, can answer.
Smart brands are focusing on experiences and using experiences
as their brand differentiator. Perhaps more than the product or
service a brand offers, delivering a unique experience is hard for your
competitors to replicate. So Experience Marketing is here now. How
can you get your brand started with making the move from more
traditional marketing approaches to Experience Marketing? Here we
demystify three typical barriers to adoption.
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ebook // Get started with Experience Marketing
Data: We can’t see our customer
In today’s digital world, the hot topic is “big data,” but for Experience
Marketing, it’s all about the collecting the “right” data in a single place
before you can even begin to understand how to design experiences
that delight customers and differentiate your brand. The right data
enables you to see every customer and every experience, across all
channels—in real time. Having a single-source, single real-time view of
each customer that can be immediately acted upon by any experience
delivery tool is essential if the brand is always to be ready to move the
customer experience journey forward, at any time.
And—it’s true—this will require a lot of data. So, to make Experience
Marketing a reality, you can’t worry about being inundated by data. You
must harness it and get technology on your side to manage it to get
what you want out of your data: rich customer insight that is ripe for
your Experience Marketing. With the Sitecore® Experience Platform™,
the Experience Database is built in, ready to receive data from any data
source, collect it, and connect the data to every individual customer—
so you always have a single view of each customer for shaping and
delivering the next experience.
62% of US senior executives state that it is an
organization priority to create a single, central
customer marketing database that houses customer
experience information.
Organizations use an average of 36 different data
gathering systems and vendors for marketing
efforts, with some using more than 100.
Forbes Insights/Sitecore, August 2014
You may think you already have enough data flows, but new data is
being generated all the time, across thousands of sources. Old data
may be irrelevant, and you need to collect everything in real time. For
a customer-centric Experience Marketing approach, you also need to
combine multiple data sources to get the full picture of your customer.
So, would you be confident in using your existing data to build real-time
customer experiences? Can and should your data be taken into account
before the next customer interaction? What kind of data approach do
you need?
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Being where your customers are: To pursue Experience Marketing, you
need data that reveals the real-time actions of your customers, with data
feeds from the channels they are operating in—spanning social media,
the web, mobile, call centers, and physical outlets—to be confident that
you have the latest view of your customers and their experiences.
Business integration: Your marketing team isn’t the only one in your
company that has valuable data. You need to access and integrate the
data generated and maintained by the finance, sales, service, support,
and IT organizations; bring it into one place; and connect the dots to see
the complete picture for each customer.
Real-time data: Old data is, well…old. Understanding the current
business or customer context at any given time requires current data.
Market data: Brands must innovate to stay competitive. You need to be
aware of what people are searching for and what disruptive companies
are doing to raise the bar on customer expectations.
Customer data: Although grouping customers into segments is useful,
it’s more important to track what individual customers are saying and
doing online and offline, as well as where they are doing it, and keep
interaction histories and profiles up to date.
Business data: Customer experiences must be profitable to sustain a
business. You need to know where you invest your resources and what
the return on those investments is.
The right data approach is vital if your brand is to start identifying
patterns, personalizing experiences, and measuring outcomes—
continuously, automatically, and effectively. Experience Marketing
depends on data, and with the right technology platform, you can take
the pain out of data collection and analysis to give your brand the
individual customer view you need.
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ebook // Get started with Experience Marketing
Decisions: Trust the analytics
How do you know what experiences your customers want? What
currently represents an exceptional customer experience in your market?
How can you design and continually deliver experiences that drive
maximum value for your business and for every unique customer? With
potentially an unlimited number of customer experiences to serve with
limited marketing resources, you must rely on data analytics tools to
automate data analysis and decision-making processes—and to trust and
implement the recommendations they give you.
Unfortunately, the only thing many organizations fear more than big data
itself is big data analytics. Some feel that the benefits and intelligence
derived from analytics don’t outweigh the effort required to use them.
Some simply don’t trust the recommendations and would rather rely on
gut instinct or personal experience.
But, practically speaking, there is no better way—no other way, really—to
make sense of the immense amount of data and make measurably better
decisions faster, given the scale and complexity inherent in Experience
Marketing. Give in to the power of analytics. You’ll be glad you did.
CMOs indicated that they infrequently leverage
marketing analytics to answer their most
challenging marketing questions. More than 1 in 8
said they weren’t leveraging analytics any of the
time to answer such questions, compared to just
4.3% saying they do so all the time.
Duke University Fuqua School of Business CMO survey, August 2013
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ebook // Get started with Experience Marketing
According to McKinsey & Company, “Companies that use customer analytics extensively are more than twice as likely to generate above-average profits as
those that don’t; an integrated analytic approach can free up to 20 percent of marketing spending; and injecting big data and analytics into operations can
help companies outperform their peers by five percent in terms of productivity and six percent in profitability.”1
The good news is that experience platforms have come a long way in terms of usability and flexibility to accommodate different data formats and sources,
different analytical approaches, and different types of users. Rather than deciding what to test, the Sitecore Experience Platform can test everything and
suggest routes for optimizing experiences. These solutions speak your language. With the right technology platform, you and your teams can feel confident
in implementing the recommendations provided by analytics to design, test, and optimize experiences across the customer life cycle.
Source: 1 McKinsey & Company, “Want big data sales programs to work? Get emotional,” September 2014.
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ebook // Get started with Experience Marketing
Delivery: Start with digital
It’s safe to say that most of the interactions customers have with your
brand today are either conducted through or influenced by digital
channels—even in the case of offline interactions. For some companies,
their very products and services are digital. Customer experiences must
be delivered digitally too. A strategic focus to ensure that digital channels
are at the heart of your interactions will be key to early success with
Experience Marketing.
Today’s business buyers do not contact suppliers
directly until 57 percent of the purchase process
is complete.
CEB Marketing Leadership Council
Digital is a powerful medium, and it’s ingrained into your customers’
lives now. Customers’ relationship with digital has gone past the
transactional—digital helps your customers get more from every day. It’s
real-time, it’s responsive, and it’s wherever your customers want to be.
Email, the web, social networking…customers are becoming “channelblind” as all these channels merge as part of their digital journey with
you. Even offline interactions are digital now, thanks to mobile devices
that extend customers’ digital interactions at your outlets. And customers
expect them all to be in sync. To deliver on those customer expectations,
you need to monitor digital channels, integrate them, and leverage the
insights they provide to improve the entire cross-channel customer
experience. What happens in one channel can be used to influence
interactions in other channels, and vice versa. And because it’s digital, you
can adjust your marketing and shape customer experiences in real time.
Focusing on digital first and foremost can give you the quick wins your
organization needs in order to invest more strategically in Experience
Marketing, and it also gives you the best foundation for future success.
With the right technology platform, you can make the most of digital
as you get your people and processes in place to support the design
and delivery of personalized cross-channel customer experiences with
Experience Marketing.
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ebook // Get started with Experience Marketing
The experience starts here
Experience Marketing is part art, part science. Experiences, by
their very nature, are individual, subjective, and full of nuance.
But Experience Marketing is made possible only with the use of
technology—by marketers and customers alike. By embracing new
technologies, customers have taken control of their buying destinies
and put a premium on digital information and channels. Marketers
must meet this trend head-on by likewise embracing new technologies
and overcoming the barriers to adoption.
What your marketing organization needs now, more than ever, is a
single, connected platform that truly sees each of your customers
as unique individuals and can deliver the highly personal, relevant
experiences they want, when and where they want them.
From day 1, the Sitecore Experience Platform was designed to give
marketers one connected, easy-to-use platform to deliver one
connected, meaningful brand experience for everyone who touches
your brand across all channels, for more profitable and productive
relationships for your brand and customers. It helps you turn big data
into actionable marketing intelligence that can be leveraged easily
by your entire organization. All your customer-facing teams can have
the same unified view of the customer, and you can all work together
toward the same goal: creating customers for life.
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Move your brand forward now
with Experience Marketing
Want to find out more about Experience Marketing? Visit our Experience
Marketing portal, at sitecore.net/experiencemarketing, to download the
first ebook in this series, Discover Experience Marketing, or register for
a demonstration of the Sitecore Experience Platform. Share your views
on Experience Marketing. Click the social media tabs below to keep the
conversation going.
About Sitecore
Sitecore is the global leader in customer experience management.
The company delivers highly relevant content and personalized
digital experiences that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive
revenue. With the Sitecore® Experience Platform™, marketers can
own the experience of every customer who engages with their
brand, across every channel. More than 4,400 of the world’s leading
brands—including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyJet,
and L’Oréal—trust Sitecore to help them deliver the meaningful
interactions that win customers for life.
For more information about Sitecore, visit sitecore.net
© 2001-2015 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience®
are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S.
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