The connected customer — the human in the center of your marketing strategy

Marketers and advertisers for enterprise brands spend a great deal of time ideating creative campaigns, marketing strategies, and processes while ensuring their costs are low and their return on investment (ROI) is high. Digital transformation has allowed organizations to enact strategies to produce marketing and advertising content across a multitude of social media channels, reaching people at record speed and efficiency. Fifty-three percent of the world’s population regularly engage with social media, typically from their mobile phones. With so much focus on producing quality content at the right time and within budget, it’s easy to sometimes forget that the customers you’re trying to reach are living, breathing humans with careers, families, bills, and obligations at the center of their lives, and also competing for their time.

To break through the noise in today’s digital-first environment, it’s critical to keep your customers — and their experiences with your brand — at the very center of your marketing operations.

Who is the connected customer?

The connected customer is everywhere. With more than four billion internet and social media users around the world, a number that’s grown by 7.3% and 13% respectively, the connected customer uses the internet and social media as a seamless part of their daily lives. They use technology for work, school, banking, shopping, transportation, and social connection. They have digital assistants. They react and respond to texts, instant messaging, emails, social media notifications, and targeted ads intuitively and naturally. Their lives are digitally enabled. And they have expectations.

Connected customer expectations

Customer expectations have shifted since the onset of the global pandemic. They expect a high level of personalization when they interact with brands. They want to easily garner information and often make quick decisions. They are also much more likely to share their experiences, both positive and negative, with their peers and online communities.

• A Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey gleaned that 90% of customers trust products and services that have been recommended by people they know.

• Seventy-seven percent of consumers regularly read online reviews as a determination of whether or not to make a product or service purchase. (Brightlocal)

• Eighty-nine percent of customers are more likely to use a business that responds to their online reviews. (Brightlocal)

When customers do have a negative experience, they expect empathy and a resolution that will build or rebuild their trust. They expect immediate results. Marketers can’t waste time or risk their brand reputation when communicating with their customers — they need to reach them on the channels that they are using and ensure that their responses are engaging and human.

When you engage with your connected customers on a human level, you’re boosting brand trust, brand loyalty, and protecting your brand’s reputation.

Unify your marketing operations

As customers are increasingly connected, oftentimes brands are increasingly disconnected. This disparity creates both challenges as well as opportunities, and brands need to consider how their marketing operations function from ideation to creation to execution throughout the marketing lifecycle. The goal of unifying your marketing operations is to ensure that each marketing activity works seamlessly together to project every campaign forward in a steady, progressive motion. Disconnected point solutions, the increased number of channels, and the volume of unstructured data can all prevent your marketing activities from being truly centered on your customer’s experience.

When organizations unify their marketing operations, with all of their marketing activities focused on excellent customer experiences, they keep the connected customer at the center. By connecting marketing, advertising, sales, care, and other customer-facing functions, you’ll create a unified digital customer experience and help effectively execute campaigns across departments, regions, and channels.

We know that creating positive customer experiences makes happier customers, and with the continuous rise of social media, internet, and mobile phone users and an always-expanding number of digital channels where your customers live, work, and play, connected customers are here to stay.

We want to help organizations bring their connected marketing to their connected customers and do it at scale. Sprinklr Marketing is part of Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform, which gives organizations a competitive advantage by bringing all of their digital strategies together in one place. Learn more about Sprinklr Marketing and download the ebook.

A Marketer’s Guide to Unification: Eliminate Silos, Build Your Brand, and Delight Your Customers

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