Why Marketing Relevance Matters In An Ever-Changing Marketplace
By Adam Roberts, VeraCentra
In marketing, “relevance” is the measure of how appropriate and valuable your product offer is to a given customer’s needs. Delivering relevance today requires a customer-centric (rather than a brand-centric) approach — one that starts with understanding the individual customer and works backwards to reverse-engineer an offer and comprehensive engagement strategy that fits their precise needs and expectations.
The digital age has made meeting customer expectations more imperative than ever. The ubiquity of smartphones and access to the World Wide Web has given rise to a new caliber of consumer. Consumers today are more informed and consequently more jaded when it comes to impersonal and irrelevant offers; they’ve already researched their buying options and have formed expectations based on product reviews and superficial brand interactions. This baseline level of expertise raises the stakes for every interaction businesses have with a prospective or existing customer. To gain and sustain wallet share in today’s competitive marketplace, businesses must deliver a kind of experiential parity — to match the highest level of relevance and ease that your customer has experienced in interactions with other brands and products — or risk becoming obsolete by comparison.
Take the example of a cable provider. Imagine calling the help number on the back of your cable box and immediately being connected to a person who knows your account, your name, your contract status, what monthly services/channels you subscribe to and any details about previous inquiries you may have made through different channels. Not only would you feel more valued if your call was met with such exceptional personal service, but the availability of such data to marketers and reps also leads to a more streamlined and meaningful conversation and better overall customer experience.
Now imagine experiencing that level of service and then returning to a cable provider that requires you to navigate a complex automated menu and manually input your account numbers, only to connect you with a representative who isn’t up to speed on your account and history. What’s more, imagine that the representative on the other end of the call launches into a sales pitch informing you about yet another service that isn’t in line with your needs, budget or expectations. Herein lies the dual threat/promise of today’s oversaturated marketplace: once you’ve experience the greatest level of relevance possible, your expectations for other brand interactions are forever altered — and no one ever settles for less when they know that more is possible. Other companies must either rise to the occasion or else lose customers and wallet share in the market.
Delivering relevance isn’t only beneficial to consumers. From a marketing standpoint, focusing on relevance leads to mutually-beneficial customer/brand relationships. Real-time access to customer data is not only helpful for sustaining meaningful connections (and building brand loyalty) but also for creating more meaningful and effective cross-sell and upsell offers as your customer’s needs evolve. Armed with real-time insight into a customer’s browsing history and purchasing habits, the aforementioned cable provider could leverage predictive analytics to anticipate that customer’s next move and propose a relevant solution at exactly the right moment.
Consider the difference in tone and value between the generic offer, “You should consider our bonus package with X extra channels for X dollars a month,” versus, “We see you’ve been purchasing X movies a month — since your subscription will be up for renewal next month, we wanted to recommend changing your subscription slightly, so you’ll save money on rentals and gain greater access to the movies you like.” The first offer lacks context and relevance, whereas the latter was created in response to that customer’s specific cable-watching habits, and was delivered at an appropriate and meaningful juncture (when their contract was up for renewal). Such beautifully orchestrated serendipity not only creates happy customers — it also lends itself to greater long-term engagement, better ROI on marketing campaigns and more sustainable revenue growth.
Though the benefits are undeniable, delivering relevance today requires a more holistic marketing strategy — one that shies away from thinking of each marketing channel as its own independent department that requires its own execution strategy. For marketers, the main hurdle to delivering relevance is not simply adopting a data management and analytics platform that makes such customer insight and customization possible. It’s learning to think of customer engagement efforts as inherently cross-channel. To do so, it’s vital to recognize that no customer interaction or conversation exists in a vacuum (nor should it be treated as such). Hitting the relevance jackpot means adopting this strategic shift and leveraging the right technological tools to make it successful.
If it sounds like the future, that’s because it is. Savvy, forward-thinking businesses around the world are investing in data management, analytics and cross-channel engagement platforms that help them deliver the greatest degree of relevance— and they’re quickly leaving their competition behind.
Adam Roberts is the Senior Account Executive at VeraCentra.