The Importance of Focusing on the Customer Journey

Our modern world is being devoured and shaped by the new Millennials that define every facet of our lives with their own terms and conditions. Yet, many of us marketers, old style and rigid to some extent, ignore this emerging goliath and still focus on business values and modern looking websites.

The question is not what you can provide to your customers? Rather, the question is how excited can you get this generation, so that they will stand in line to buy your product? That is the power soft education, empowerment and a core value based approach has on this Millennial generation. It is about building a relationship of trust and doing a dance with your customers in real-time. CMS platforms just become a product and a tool that enables this complex relationship, which is driven to the core by content, context and marketing strategy.

In the past, brands have been the sum of its parts that have propelled companies to stardom, but with changing times, it has become a collection of micro-experiences that are delivered to your new age customers via value, promotions, content across every touch point, device and platform. It is no longer about how valuable your brand is; the new mantra is how your customer perceives it across touch points like smartphones and tablets.

The goal here is to create something so simple that it hides the complexity of technology from them and exposes the simplicity of the experience. How cool and vanguard your technology is, has no worth to this new Millennial. If you can find a way to reach them, then they will find a way to put you at the forefront of stardom; in front of millions without a single dime of marketing expense.

It is this need to focus on customer value, their needs, their preferences and their behavioral buying journey that is defining new marketers’ business strategies. CMSs like Sitecore are just products. If you focus on the product then there are many to choose from, hence focus on this confluence of technology and unique customer journey to create a value proposition to be reckoned with. Create something that provides instant gratification and you will notice that the buying decision immediately shifts from being a rational one to one that is based on emotion.

The key component of this core customer journey lies in context and content marketing. This is where you design and retool yourself to meet your customer expectation at their own terms, where they need it, and when they need it across all channels. This is your eureka moment where you become part of the solution. Marketers need to figure out how we churn this big context and content soup to build trust with their customers, providing relevant and critical information at the right moment to create a performance multiplier. This is what brands like Uber and Starbucks have exemplified to their advantage, information at the customer’s fingertips and most importantly- simplicity.