There has been a lot going on recently in the marketing arena. With such an immense shift to digital, marketers needed to re-think, re-direct, and scale digital commerce. Demand has shifted toward customers and customer interface has become the primary marketing focus around
how do we serve?
how do we interact, support, and add value?
how do we deal directly with individuals, with their needs and expectations?
how do we build and maintain the relationship?
Customers expect to resolve their challenges through their selected channel, they expect an immediate resolution of their problem, and they expect processes and policies to be adapted to virtual interactions, not to the in-person buying journey, they expect the experience to be quick and simple,
Therefore, marketing needed to pivot and become much more accessible, visible, and collaborative across the company. This change was accelerated by the pandemic and marketing responded well. By embracing automation faster than it usually would, by working collaboratively across departments, and by becoming increasingly connected over the enterprise. Ultimately evolving to become a CX owner.
Future success is closely linked to how you interact with your customers how they become more engaged through interaction, how you use real-time data to respond to customer needs, provide value and support. So, when senior leadership evaluates the marketing performance, they look at how well marketing
predicts, anticipates, reacts, and adapts to the transformative shift within the company.
identifies which are the most valued customers, how those are managed, and how a relationship with those customers is stimulated.
monetizes those customers by providing additional value, looks for revenue opportunities for cross/up/ after-sale, and builds on partnering opportunities.
influences purchase, by becoming more suggestive, presenting solutions more effectively to enrich the customer profiles stimulating conversion and return by the provision of value.
Marketing is incredibly fragmented and needs to overcome the silo orientation through collaboration by following business-centric KPIs to demonstrate value. Marketers have a tremendous challenge to shift into a customer-relevant role. The whole organization's future is linked to this transition and evolution of marketing organization.
To be able to succeed, there is a need for a receptive organizational mindset to manage the digital transformation. The common challenges are digital skills and capabilities along with the knowledge of how to integrate assets and resources to support and serve customers better throughout their complete journey. Therefore, strong functional leaders are so important when you go through this transformation. You need strategic thinkers, able to map and model the go-to-market strategy, while being able to manage the complexity of the execution, all in one. Because there is a direction to set and complexity to manage when we respond to now, map and shape for tomorrow when we collaborate and co-create to provide customer value.