Elevating Customer Experience: The TEKsystems Perspective

19 July 2022

Customers are on the receiving end of thousands of messages daily. Those messages are coming from web, email, social media, texts, podcasts and everywhere in between. And the content marketing life cycle is incredibly short.

So, how do we develop a content strategy that’s more effective, one that maps content to specific customer needs?

Brands must renounce random acts of content. Intention is critical. A content strategy gives brands that necessary intention and direction as they aspire to nurture relationships, elevate the customer experience and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

An effective enterprise content strategy connects brand, marketing and customer. To do this, organisations need to take several critical factors into consideration:

The buyer persona. An archetype or common traits for each segment of the organization’s target audience.

The customer journey. Content should be available for every stage of the buyer journey, including awareness, consideration and decision stages, and through every interaction along their purchase decision.

The channel. Customers are consuming content across platforms and channels, including web, mobile, email, video and even voice.

Data. Data should be leveraged to provide messages that add value for the customer in that moment.

Digital technologies, such as marketing automation platforms and CMS, enable organisations to deliver seamless customer experiences across moments and channels. The technology allows them to engage customers methodically and with intention, reaching them at the right time and place and with the right message for their needs in that moment in time. But technology cannot enable a strategy that doesn’t exist. A truly seamless experience demands a clear vision and strategy for what the experience should be.

Personalise or Get Tuned Out

Mass, generic and undifferentiated messaging doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to get personal, or hyper-personal, by demonstrating a genuine, human understanding of the customer. Hyper-personalisation allows you to weave in extreme amounts of empathy using data. Get that message to the right person at the right time so it creates a relationship with the brand.

To successfully implement personalisation into the content strategy, organisations need to clarify business goals, define customer segments and personas, and manage holistic customer data. With those steps in place, data will power the content strategy. When leveraged appropriately, data enables organisations to send messages that add value and meet buyers where they are. But many organisations struggle with maximising the value of data within their digital marketing experience.

Common Data Pitfalls

Disparate data: Data lives in disparate places, making it challenging to see the big picture. Centralisation and coordination is key to maximise your channels.

Ownership of data: Often internal politics get in the way of a successful data strategy to power content.

Data hygiene: Lack of clean data is often the number one reason companies can’t scale their content.

Personalisation at Scale

In the past, a marketing campaign life cycle could extend anywhere from a couple months to a year. But today, e-commerce and digital are driving organisations to run campaigns in a matter of weeks. Creative studios are an operational model that allow brands to meet the demands of faster timelines for delivering personalisation at scale. For example, seasonal or holiday campaigns are very time sensitive, and their relevance only lasts so long. Organisations are tasked with serving up enticing, timely campaigns that may only be relatable for a couple weeks or days. Creating this type of content at scale is a rigorous and ongoing task, and many organisations find it difficult to manage exclusively in-house. Creative studios are the solution that enable organisations to execute with scale and precision.

The Value of Creative Studios

The creative studio model supports end-to-end production of creative assets, websites and applications. This highly efficient way of working allows organizations to optimize work velocity and quality, scale a team based on evolving needs and free up in-house staff with more intimate knowledge of the brand to focus on other strategic projects.

TEKsystems’ Tips to Conquering Content

Show empathy: Because customers are being inundated with messages, it is that much harder to differentiate. Show empathy and a human, emotional level of understanding of where a customer is on their journey. Not only will this set you apart, but it will strengthen trust with the customer and create lasting connections to the brand.

Optimise tools: Scaling any aspect of the business generally starts with technology. Most organisations are only using about 50%–60% of the technology effectively. To see real value, focus on optimising these tools.

Build a multidisciplined team: People who understand the marketing and technology sides of the equation are uniquely positioned to thrive. But this T-shaped talent is hard to come by. Leverage creative studios to not only fill talent gaps, but also to enable efficient, end-to-end creative production at scale.

Centralise data: The tools are only as good as the data we feed into them. Data that lives in different places can’t inform each other. And with many platforms, it becomes increasingly difficult to merge the information and make it actionable.

Measure what matters: Demonstrating the value of content efforts is essential but often a struggle. Metrics to monitor:

• Marketing conversion rates
• Repeat business and multiproduct/service relationships (i.e., increased share of wallet)
• Customer feedback through reviews, satisfaction scores and Net Promoter Scores
• Revenue growth

Track ROI: The brands that figure out how to monetise, measure and declare either victory or failure of their content strategy are going to be the ones that stick around and grow.