Rule 1: Provide your customers with the best level of comfort
The first piece of evolving your communication strategy is understanding what can and should be done now versus later. The degree of granularity you should employ in planning out the journey-based messaging and customer segmentation is dependent on factors such as
- the type of business you are in
- the level of comfort your customers have in sharing data about themselves with you,
- and the level of change that is needed within your organization.
Rule 2: What they want is more important than what you can offer!
As we walk down towards the path of change along with our customers, it becomes essential to carve a roadmap based on their actions. A different pathway leading to a different objective. Ensure it focuses on areas where you have struggled to make choices about how to talk to people. Ask about
- how they want to engage with you,
- what is important to them about the product,
- what would be helpful to them as they make their decisions,
- and then start to prompt them to provide the answers that you want to know.
Rule 3: Think fast and slow to gradually build both short- and long-term vision
The largest concern here is that you try to go faster than your company can manage. The second concern is that you change too quickly for your customers to adapt.
“The point is to make a plan that has the flexibility to move at the pace that allows you to achieve small wins.”
Moreover, this plan will limit your risk of trying to become too familiar too fast. The best roadmaps for change are built with three-month cycles that gradually build to a long-term vision. During those cycles, you identify three to five key learning objectives that are evaluated, and then you cycle with new objectives in the next three-month block. Think of it like Agile development for marketing.
Marketers today are paying attention to minute things that their audiences notice such as:
how something is said as what is said
the choice of media
the tone of voice
the words that are used
Even the way things smell, as mentioned by Seth Godin in “All Marketers are Liars”.
Anything and everything that takes for creating a biased impression of your product. It’s not just the quality of the product that matters, its everything. It’s their biased outlook which you create for them to like or dislike your brand which gets them into buying the service or neglecting it even before considering.
Learn more about how you can get your customers to flaunt about your brand with detailed procedures and steps to be followed to deliver the best customer experience in the white paper released by Merkle, ‘Marketing Imperatives‘ for free.
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