What does an E-commerce team, Marketing team, Brand team, PR team and Customer Service team all have in common? CUSTOMERS! Despite this, all too often when I talk to brands I find that these teams don’t talk to one another (even in pure-play online businesses!) and yet, they are all chasing the same customer. As marketers, how do we change this? How do we break down the walls between teams with the same ultimate goals?
Here’s how you can start:
1. Get a single view of who your key customers are
To make marketing teams and budgets more impactful, they all need to share the same customer view. How can you do this? With data. Your own data. You don’t need expensive third-party tools (at least not to begin with), as chances are you probably have enough data. The problem might be that it’s siloed and you lack a single lens through which to view it.
Wait, what data?
I’m taking about joining web analytics, product review data and CRM data. This will give you a great starting point as it will allow you to identify and prioritise key customer segments, helping you understand who buys from you and what their behavioural traits are i.e. what they buy from you and how often, their interests, what type of language they use, and which device type they prefer.
When you have a clear understanding of who your customers are, you can begin to plan out all other marketing activity – messaging, content, landing pages, emails, channels etc. – all tied back to a particular customer segment. From here, you can begin to personalise your website content and the content you push out to your other channels.
What other channels are we talking about?
It’s no longer enough to have a website and personalise the content you have here, you need to offer the same experience across multiple channels and it ALL needs to tie back to a customer segment. What good is understanding your customer if all you do is blast out the same message to everyone?
customer-segmentation-diagram
2. Stop trying to measure the performance of single channels – your customers don’t engage with you like this
If I had £1 for every time I had a conversation with a client about siloed channel measurement where they want to understand the ROI of Paid vs. Organic or Display because ‘that’s how the board like it reported’ then I would have retired already. The way your customers discover your brand has changed. Years ago, if you weren’t on Google, you couldn’t win at online. Today, if you don’t understand ‘where’ your customer is (both physically and digitally), you are not going to win – at all.
Sure, you can optimise for well researched keywords across search engines, but if your content is not relevant and is not available across channels at all stages of the customer journey, then you can’t influence. Social channels are majorly influential at connecting customers with new brands. The problem is it can be harder to measure. The solution, measure KPI’s around your customers – number of customers, revenue, visits, AOV, conversion rate etc.
3. Use the data that you already have, don’t add more tools
I have seen some outstanding customer insights which have transformed the way brands have planned and executed their marketing activity, from product development all the way out across brand and PR (and up to the board), and it didn’t involve investing hundreds of thousands of pounds in expensive technology.
In order to provide marketing teams (and boards!) access to vast quantities of data in an easy to analyse format, all you need is a smart data analyst and something like PowerBI or Google Big Query. These types of platforms allow you to create your own window into this data in the form of bespoke dashboards (like the one below).
This then allows powerful insights into customer segments which can then be used to drive customer acquisition and growth.
In summary, internal teams need to get better at aligning around their shared customer and streamline the number of metrics and tools they use in order to measure the effectiveness of their activities. If you’re interested in hearing more about this and learning how DAC UK can help your company, get in touch here.
