Content area
Full Text
In an omni-channel marketing universe, brands trying to be all things to all customers will get lost in the shuffle.
Before the digital revolution, branded customer experiences had a beginning, middle, and end. The marketer's goal was relatively simple: to guide consumers smoothly down the linear path to a purchase. What happened once the customer left the store wasn't all that important.
These days, things are hardly so neat. With a smartphone in every consumer's pocket, disruption is an ever-present possibility. In addition, paid marketing messages make far less noise than they used to. Brands must work hard to be heard over the cacophony of conversations about them on Facebook, Twitter and user forums. These social media and word-of-mouth platforms carry more weight with digital consumers than conventional advertising. Today's omni-channel marketing universe requires brands to be fanatical about the consistency of their messaging across all relevant touchpoints.
The classic "marketing funnel" is now a cycle. Marketers should forget the straight-and-narrow purchase path of old and learn to master far more twisty terrain. There is no universal formula for digital adaptation; the optimal customer journey will look somewhat different for each brand, but there are five general points marketers should keep sight of.
1. Increase Your Technological Versatility
To keep pace with the breakneck speed of technological change, brands will have no choice but to beef up their tech portfolio -- which is why a Gartner analyst predicted that by 2017, CMOs' IT spend will exceed that of CIOs. According to research from eBay, consumers now use, on average, up to five devices or platforms to research and complete a single purchase. The challenge here...