This next submission was indeed presented courtesy of Kapost. I usually take pleasure in reading through 1 of their blog posts because they are genuinely instructional. I’m guessing you’ll enjoy.

Early in my career, I worked for Larissa Herda, a CEO who taught me a valuable lesson in marketing:

If you compete on price, you’ll lose on price. If you compete on experience, you’ll have something no one else can compete with.

Larissa was smart when it came to business success. As she worked her way up from the sales team to the corner office, she knew what customers cared about. It didn’t matter how good of a deal they got if, overall, the experience wasn’t fabulous.

I worked for Larissa as the world was beginning to lean into digital transformation. While that conversation seems light years away, her lesson still rings true. Since then, we dove into social media, content marketing, tech stacks, and personalization. Marketers now need to move beyond engagement and look at the natural expansion into customer experience.

Changing consumer behavior has driven changing B2B buyer behavior. Because customers own and control the access to information, the quality of every connection becomes that much more critical. It’s time to think beyond best-practices in tactics and strategies and look at the bigger picture of marketing’s role in customer experience—all while we tie it to driving growth and revenue for the business. Today, marketers must move from an approach based purely on engagement to a deeper ownership of the customer experience.

5 Steps to Move from Engagement to CX

1. Champion the customer. This seems like a no-brainer. However, I’m consistently shocked at the number of marketers who’ve never spent face-to-face time with customers. (Focus groups don’t count.) It’s impossible to champion an idea or a person purely by looking at data. Learn first-hand what a day in their life looks like—I guarantee you’ll realize two things: First, your product is not the center of their world. They see it as a means to an end to address a bigger need. Second, you’ll find opportunities to help them in ways you never imagined. This is the experience that customers care about most and a silver bullet to creating an indispensable relationship with them.
2. Expand beyond the funnel. Marketers are just starting to get the hang of creating connected content that guides people through the buyer’s journey. To be successful at owning the customer experience, we have to look at a much larger group of moving parts. What does a complete customer journey look like? What goes on in their world before they ever look for someone to solve their problem? How can we be helpful by showing up in ways we never imagined? For example, one airline prompts people to apply for TSA Precheck to avoid long security lines at the airports. The frustrations for some customers going through security—like families with young children—can make the difference in whether they decide to travel by plane. This airline helps make that decision easier.
3. Create connected experiences. Connected customers mean smarter customers, but we have to reevaluate what “connected” means. Technology has significantly changed people’s expectations of how companies should interact with them. Buyers expect responses in real-time. However, while we live in a digital-first world, customers still value human relationships and empathy in interactions. We have to connect people from one experience to another, while also seamlessly integrating online and off-line interactions.
4. Strategically pick points. B2B customers are empowered to communicate, research, browse and buy wherever they are and whenever they want. But let’s face it: we don’t have the budget to be everywhere for everyone. That’s why we have to know our customers really, really well, and understand how they prioritize their interactions. It’s better to be jaw-droppingly great at six interactions than mediocre at twenty.
5. Look for bigger-picture insights from data. Today’s marketers need to understand how to stay ahead of changing customer expectations and avoid getting passed from behind. B2B customers expect companies to quickly innovate based on what they prefer—that means looking at the behavior that triggers an interaction and why. What trends do we see across numerous customer interactions that tell a different story than when we look at individual touchpoints? For example, one transportation company looked at customer behavior within individual transactions and felt they were headed down the right road. But when they brought in a broader perspective from people outside of marketing, they had a completely different view. They now saw opportunities to solve bigger problems with little effort on their part. This takes us back to why we need to understand our customers’ journey if we’re going to be able to deliver the highest quality—and value—experience.

Looking Ahead

Marketing will perpetually evolve. But today we’re at the threshold of one of the biggest opportunities to change how people perceive the work we do and the impact we can have. Marketers need to understand what CEOs like Larissa Herda already believe—it’s time marketing strategy became synonymous with business strategy to deliver smarter, more valuable and highly intuitive customer experiences that drive business growth.

Download The Guide to B2B Content to learn more about the future of content from today’s marketing leaders.

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Kapost provided you with this post. I always look ahead to reading through any one of their posts because they’re totally interesting. I hope you find it interesting.

Three years ago, when I started at Cylance, all of our content was housed in Box. Nobody knew how old anything was, whether it was up to date, who had created the assets, what it should be used for, or what audience it spoke to. There was no categorization. There was no taxonomy. There was no real strategy to the way we were storing, updating, or creating our content.

It wasn’t that our content was no good. In fact, we had a lot of great stuff from respected security experts—but it was being produced in a vacuum. It was not aligned with our overall campaign strategy. We were putting it out there without much thought as to how it was going to reach the audience, connect to other topics, how it would be measured, and what it was intended to do for that audience (or for our business).

Not surprisingly, we received feedback that customers were confused about what “the message” was from us, and what our clear differentiated value was. We knew we had a problem, but we didn’t yet have a strong approach for how to solve it.

And that was the job I was given—to do an inventory and an audit, to clean up, update, track and devise a real content strategy that could tighten the message, address the right topics, and speak to the themes that our audience was seeking answers for. I was lucky to be given some degree of autonomy to make decisions about how we were going to tackle the problem. I got to do the research, which showed that there definitely are good, modern approaches to solving these problems. It was reassuring to learn that others had experienced the same problems and taken on these challenges before we even got there.

And while I learned more about available systems and processes that can make a huge difference, I realized that the first thing that had to change was our thinking.

Before doing anything else, there were a few key content lessons that we needed to internalize.

1. Recognize that Content Is Critical

Content has become the gas that fuels the entire engine of the company. There is no position within the organization that is not using content that the marketing team generates in some way. HR, sales, operations, finance—everyone is using some piece of content that marketing creates.

Marketing content is no longer the “supporting material” is used to be. Your content operation is core to your overall customer experience and their buyer’s journey. Good content won’t guarantee a good customer experience, but there isn’t much chance of creating a good customer experience without it.

2. Tell the Whole Story

Managing content that drives the customer experience—especially for those working in SaaS or similar business models—requires telling the whole story. You’re driving the entire customer life cycle from brand and solution awareness, to purchase and investment through deployment, to satisfaction and loyalty, and if you’re good, through the point of upsell or cross-sell.

You are responsible for that entire customer journey. And if you’re not paying attention to how content feeds the whole journey all the way through, you run the risk of missing out on a lot of market share.

3. Know Your Customers and Channels

If you’re putting together a real customer experience strategy, you need to understand who your customers are. And that means having a good understanding of key personas, and the business challenges that each of those personas face. At Cylance, in the cybersecurity market, we’re trying to speak to Chief Security Officers (CSOs) or Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), because they often end up being the decision-makers.

But we’re also trying to reach the security analysts and the people who are in the trenches every day. CISOs have to report to the board of directors about what the risk management and risk mitigation strategies are over the coming quarter or year, whereas security analysts deal, on average, with seven different platforms every day—they’re lost in all the alerts popping up and the different responses that are required for each. Both groups are critical, and we have to be sure our message gets to each of them.

We realized that reaching each of those two audiences requires a different approach. It’s no longer sufficient to have one message in one format; that doesn’t work anymore. And on top of the message, you have to take into account that people prefer to consume content in so many different ways. Some like to sit down and read a white paper from end to end; others prefer to watch videos or listen to podcasts; still, others like to glance at the occasional social media post.

You have to pay attention to how you deliver content across a wide variety of formats to reach your whole audience. Even if it’s the same message—or rather because it is the same message—it needs to be unified across all the different channels.

4. Speak with One Voice

Above all, you have to get everybody singing from the same song sheet. You need the whole organization to articulate the same clear messages to each audience so that the company finds a consistent voice. Whether it’s sales out in the market having conversations with customers, whether it’s the way you’re organizing your white papers or your blogs, whatever it is—every aspect of the content you produce—it all needs to work in concert.

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And that’s the big lesson: Without that single voice, none of these other strategies can do much good. But if you can find that voice, you make it possible to truly align your content with your strategy. And beyond that, you make it possible to provide a truly extraordinary experience to your customers.

Download The Guide to B2B Content to learn more content lessons from today’s marketing leaders.

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