There is no doubt that we work and live in an engagement economy, and marketers know it: 82% of them make customer experience their priority, whether online or offline. We know that we must indeed engage with our consumers in order to continue generating revenue.
But it isn’t easy. Our world is flooded with excessive amounts of content, best practices, and technology, all with the aim of increasing the level of personalization for our audience.
So what is the primary barrier that practically prevents marketers from moving forward and running creative and innovative campaigns that produce incredible results?
The primary barrier to customer engagement
The first challenge marketers face in terms of customer engagement is tools and technology.
You are certainly wondering how this is possible. There are so many different marketing tools; just take a look at Binker’s list, which contains more than 7,000 technologies.
So what is it about marketing technologies that hinders the development of customer relationships? Marketers have to deal with the frustration of lacking the necessary or effective tools, technologies that are too complex, and a lack of integrations.
With this information in mind, it stands to reason that there are so many conferences and technology trade shows. We have conferences because it is too complicated to know which technologies can be connected to each other. In fact, only 8% of marketers feel that their tools easily adapt to others. This makes our jobs even more difficult when it is supposed to make them easier.
Here are the three main characteristics you need to create a technology stack that enables you to create an effective customer experience:
- Relevance
- Automation
- Reporting
1. Relevance
The main reason why customers do not interact with brands is that they send too much irrelevant content. B2B and B2C buyers expect brands to integrate at least email, website, and phone interactions. They expect emails to reflect the conversation they had with a salesperson the previous week.
This means that an effective customer engagement platform must integrate interactions to provide personalized and relevant content to every buyer or customer, every time.
2. Automation
An effective customer engagement platform must be automated. There is no way to scale when you are manually delivering relevant and personalized content to every customer. At a minimum, the three main tactics marketers need are email marketing, mobile marketing, and integrated social media.
Automating each of these efforts means that every user gets personalized content and a unified brand experience across each of the most important channels. The right technology ensures that nothing is forgotten or neglected, and marketers can spend their time planning strategies and campaigns rather than checking off routine content or analysis tasks.
3. Reporting
Analytics and reporting are increasingly crucial for modern marketers, especially when it comes to ROI. And the specific challenges marketers face in measuring return on investment include turning data into action, demonstrating value, and defining revenue-related metrics.
This is where the advantage of a single platform truly shines compared with even the most integrated MarTech stack. To easily extract the metrics you need to create meaningful and actionable reports, you need an application capable of accessing, understanding, merging, and reporting on the figures from every campaign. Manually merging metrics from different applications that measure different campaigns is the opposite of simple and efficient.
Marketers are increasingly being asked to prove that their efforts affect revenue – and your technology should be able to combine all metrics into a seamless reporting experience.
Make sure you have the right tool(s).
Whether you are just starting to invest in marketing technology, considering adding tools to your stack, or overwhelmed by the frustration of too many ineffective tools – ease (or avoid) the pain by making sure you are looking for the right tool.
(Because there are really cool and shiny things that are more exciting than useful.) It is easy to get carried away.
A single engagement platform, which can cover your email, your social content, your content, etc., is the best way to ensure that your programs work together. But it is possible to build a stack of smaller tools that work together.
Just make sure to automate repetitive tasks, deliver personalized / relevant content to every member of your audience, and request fully integrated analytics reports from the technology stack of your choice.
