We’ve talked about how companies can grow from using Digital Marketing to the next stage called Experience Marketing and finally maturing to the Brand Experience as a way of gaining and establishing lifelong customers. In order to further understand the pathway to Brand Experience, let’s take a look at the Customer Experience Maturity Model™ which provides step-by-step guidance to marketing success. This digital transformation model allows companies to get the greatest value from their technology, people, and processes.
Within the model, there are seven stages of customer experience maturity with three overarching broader contexts. As you read through them, take note of the stage your company is at currently.
The Customer Experience Maturity Model
Attract
- Initiate - Uses a “brochure site” presence on the web with email campaign capabilities and web analytics.
- Radiate - Focuses on distributing content across channels starting with the customer’s most used channels. Examples include establishing a mobile site and sharing content on social networks.
- Align - Aligns digital initiatives with strategic and marketing objectives. Content is optimized to focus on customer needs and intentions.
Convert
- Optimize - Focuses on optimizing digital initiatives. Uses a combination of analytics aimed at actionable insights and then optimization is executed with testing and personalization.
- Nurture - Focuses on the customer and builds strong relationships through automated trigger-based dialogue. Relevant conversations happen in the customer’s preferred channels.
Advocate
- Engage - Establishes the data infrastructure that connects online and offline customer data repositories into a central customer repository. Customer profile data can be used in real time for relevant one-on-one dialogue across channels.
- Lifetime Customers - Optimize the connected cross-channel customer experience by using real time data and predictive analytics to anticipate the needs of customers and create timely, relevant one-to-one dialogue.
At what stage is your company’s marketing? If you chose Initiate or Radiate, you are not alone. Over 85 percent of companies are in these first two most immature stages.
In the Align, Optimize, and Nurture stages, organizations take advantage of marketing technology and optimization processes. Align ensures that digital goals drive strategic business objectives. Optimize uses Engagement Value metrics to increase marketing impact and efficiency by providing a more personalized experience. Nurture uses experience automation to engage each individual, using personalized marketing sequences across channels.
The Engage stage is a difficult hurdle for organizations using marketing technology that was not conceived and built from the beginning as a connected platform. It is the Engage stage where your organization needs to integrate cross-functional systems to create a true single view of the customer.
The Lifetime Customer stage is the ultimate goal for most companies. At this stage, marketers can predict customers’ needs and build customer advocates for life using sophisticated personalization algorithms and big data.
While it may seem like a complicated, long path to travel, remember that you will be ahead of your competition and poised to grow your business for years to come if you take the time and invest in reaching the Brand Experience stage. You will understand your customers better than anyone else and be able to forge one-to-one contiguous relationships with them. Next time we’ll talk about the reality of and challenges to building these relationships within your company.
