The top three obstacles that marketers face in 2015 are apparently;
- New business development
- Quality of leads
- Keeping up to date with current marketing technology and trends
This is according to research conducted globally across 5000 marketing professionals and published in the 2015 State of Marketing by salesforce.com Marketing Cloud.
The report is interesting and you can find a copy here via the fierce website. Below is the full list of 20 challenges that were articulated;
The report goes on to further confirm the focus on digital platforms for marketing and that this year is the ‘definitive’ year for mobile.
The report also talks about ‘using technology to craft the customer journey’ and goes on to state;
“For the past 10 years, digital channels and data points have been accumulating at breakneck speed. Every industry has been disrupted. The customer now rules, and speed is the new currency of business. Marketers have scarcely had a moment to make sense of it all with a single big idea that ties everything together. Enter the customer journey. A growing number of marketers today are envisioning their entire marketing strategy under the umbrella of a cohesive customer journey, which we define as all of the interactions a customer has with brands, products, or services across all touchpoints and channels.
According to recent research, 86% of senior-level marketers say that it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey. Another 11% view the customer journey as moderately important.
Technology is the essential glue that connects various moments along the customer journey to create one-to-one experiences. From analytics that help marketers create personalized interactions, to mobile applications that create personal brand experiences for every interaction, to CRM tools that let marketers track the span of a customer relationship, the customer journey relies completely on its technological elements.”
The article goes on to chart exactly which technologies are priority to creating a cohesive customer journey;
The top 3 being;
- Mobile applications
- Marketing analytics
- CRM tools
So it was at this point that the penny dropped. What about customer retention? Why isn’t this a business challenge?
Are 5000 global marketers saying that customer retention is really not a challenge? Arguably, it could sit outside of the top 20 or it could sit within the ‘other’ category at 1% but to me this doesn’t feel right.
Now I’m not a marketer I must confess, but this feels like marketing are trying to do what they’ve always done. That is to focus pretty much exclusively on front end customer acquisition, with a sprinkling of a focus on ‘in life’ customer interaction but with little or no focus on customer retention, advocacy and loyalty throughout the customer journey. They’re currently trying to do this by moving away from more traditional marketing tools and instead using lots of sparkly new digital toys without truly understanding new digital, personalised customer habits and trends. As a result, there’s no paradigm shift to a new marketing mind set that sees the total customer lifetime as their responsibility beyond mere acquisition.
Now it might be that these 5000 marketers have in their business, someone else responsible for customer retention but surely if this is the case, these should be symbiotically related and so as to share the responsibility of customer retention beyond mere acquisition? It’s more costly just to shovel new customers in at the front end without the opportunity to retain and grow those same customers for life.
To further substantiate this point, looking at the top 10 technologies to create a cohesive customer journey, there’s no mention of any Voice of Customer (VoC) technology to provide customer insight into the journey at critical touch points as a way to further inform and improve the customer experience and subsequently the marketing process.
VoC systems such as SandSIV’s VoC Hub are as much an asset to marketing as they are to any other part of the business and marketing are missing a trick if they’re not ‘plugged in’ to, or even considering tools like this to complete the holistic picture of the end to end customer experience.
Whilst it shows an increased willingness for marketers to communicate with customers across multiple channels and touch points, the rationale for this is still based on what’s most important to the business first (new customer acquisition), rather than what’s most important to customers.
‘Listen hard and act fast’ as SandSIV would say and include VoC within the marketing mind set and on the technology wish if you want to stay ahead.
