A good resolution for 2015: Turn your customers into your brand ambassadors!

To make the new year a marketing success, the focus has to be on relevant and fresh content and creating customer trust along every step of the customer journey.

Marketing managers, company heads and website editors should keep these trends and tips in mind for 2015:

1. Turn your customers into brand ambassadors

The primary engine of customer communication is good content embedded in a content strategy that is consistently followed throughout the entire company. To achieve this, companies should no longer look solely at the buyer's journey – the process a customer goes through to search for, find and purchase a product – but at the customer journey. After purchasing the product, customers assess their experiences, consider upgrades or add-ons, request services and share their experiences with others. Companies that want to make the most of these dynamics should look at the big picture; view the entire customer journey as relevant and actively manage it. High-quality and relevant content is essential at every touch point. Companies create the ideal customer journey when they succeed in looking at customers as potential ambassadors for their products and brands and support them in this role. If the customer has positive experiences throughout the entire process – from product selection to delivery and service – this goal can become a reality. Only satisfied customers recommend products and merchants, thus becoming ambassadors of the brand.

2. Trust me: Customer touch points become customer trust points

Everyone is talking about personalisation and content targeting in real time. Yet personalised communication is only possible if the customers are prepared to share their personal data. And they will only do so if they trust the company and if the results offer added value. This is why companies need to look at their customer touch points as customer trust points and plan their personalisation and content marketing strategies accordingly and on a sustained level for 2015. The control of authentic, personalised content at all touch/trust points becomes simpler and more efficient if a strong content management system (CMS) is installed as the main control system – one that merges all digital marketing activities and content, thus helping to create a consistent image across all touchpoints and further building customer trust.

3. Do not overdo it: The drawbacks of data collection and personalisation

The opinion on personalised customer targeting is divided: whereas some consumers welcome personalised offers, others are uncomfortable knowing that their personal data will be stored. Those who want to acquire and keep new customers should not come across as too aggressive. Otherwise, users might feel harassed and turn away. Companies need to find a balance between different marketing activities and sensible ways of personalisation.

4. Make marketing more automated and link with solutions

The major challenge for many companies in the coming year will consist of combining all trust points in a strategic approach. The trend in 2015 will go towards best-of-breed and away from suite solutions in 2015. Suite solutions can be cumbersome and cannot cover all company requirements equally. Whether e-commerce, email marketing, social media, video streaming, analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), digital asset management (DAM) or product information management (PIM) – it doesn't matter what solution from which supplier is most suitable. What does matter is if they can be combined as needed to interact consistently to make the customer journey seamless and better. As a central hub a well-integrated CMS helps to merge content and solutions and to manage it all consistently and easily from a single user-friendly interface.

5. Cleverly personalise digital content: Real-time targeting

Providing customised content based on a customer's interest and personality is a complex challenge, but real-time targeting features can help content editors to get a handle on it. Thus, the CMS helps users to create, manage and update digital content for any number of defined roles or persons as needed as well as automatically making it available at the correct trust points, at the right time. The CMS additionally ensures the optimal (responsive) display of different output formats, on smartphones, tablets or desktop PCs. Using a tool like FirstSpirit's Persona Simulator enables editors and marketers to check and improve all personalisation variants – directly in their work environment.

Managing the trust points along the customer journey is one of the central activities around which 2015 marketing strategies will revolve. Turning customers into brand ambassadors will be a main focus for all companies and their marketing managers this year. This is also important as more than 70 per cent of all content nowadays is user-generated. The companies that manage to gain positive user-generated content for their brands, services and products will grow and enjoy greater success. To this end, the CMS will become ever more significant for companies in tailoring content and digital experiences for targeted customer groups along the customer journey.

 

By Oliver Jäger, Vice President of Global Marketing & Communications at e-Spirit. 

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