Don’t just meet demand, create it with experience-led demand marketing.
Marketers are constantly told to meet customer demands through the experiences they build. But what if customer experiences didn’t just satisfy user demand — what if they were good enough to create demand too?
68% of CMOs say CX is expected to be a driver of growth in their businesses. Experiences go beyond a specific channel, line of business or message — it’s the make-or-break factor in whether a customer cares about a brand and wants to invest in what they’re offering. It can also mean the difference between a stagnating business, versus one that’s able to grow dynamically into new markets.
Achieving hyper-growth through experience marketing all boils down to how brands think about satisfying and generating this demand.
What does demand marketing actually mean?
Under the great umbrella of customer experience, demand marketing is the process through which brands build buzz and enthusiasm around a product. We all know the phenomenon of being told about a service or item that ‘we didn’t even know we needed until now.’ Demand marketing is the intersection between marketing and sales to create that lightbulb moment during a customer’s journey, when they realize the need for your brand’s offering.
Bring together the demand marketing philosophy with an experience-led approach and brands can tap into a marketing superpower.
How disruptive brands conjure up demand with personalized experiences
1. Tracking needs across the journey
The issue
Buyer journeys are different for each and every customer. That means tracking customer behaviours across an exploding set of channels and tools gets trickier everyday for CMOs wanting to drive growth.
Some customers need to see a price point at the very outset of their relationship with your brand, whilst others need to understand the difference it makes to their business or home life via a human testimonial long before they consider pricing. What customers need to know about your brand before progressing to the next stage will be unique and highly personal. Many brands simply don’t have the resources to personalize at that scale and rate.
The answer
Marketers need a centralized tech infrastructure to help them track every buyer’s needs and where they are in their journey towards brand dedication at all times. Experience automation tools such as Adobe’s Marketo Engage allow brands to score engagement at every point in a customer journey by tracking user behaviour across multiple accounts, channels and programs.
Marketing automation also means organizations can pinpoint when the right time for a sales call or direct mail is via an intelligent scoring and trigger system. Tracking users across a growing number of channels requires a contact level that’s simply impossible for marketing teams to handle themselves. That means automation is the only route to nurturing customers at every stage and any moment of their journey with a brand.
2. Generating highly personalized content
The issue
Today’s marketers need to quickly create, access and activate a constant stream of content. What’s more, that content needs to be highly relevant to users, and delivered on the right channel and at the right moment in time.
A single piece of content, such as a product announcement or promotional offer, might need to be translated into a high volume of different ‘languages’ that speak to each user in ways they understand and connect with - in order to spark the demand lightbulb. That takes deep customer insight and continuous optimization - two key challenges for CMOs in today’s digital landscape.
The answer
Cutting edge solutions now have the ability to use machine learning to predict what the most relevant content is for each person interested in a brand or product.
Tools like Marketo Engage can even crawl sites and digital assets to dig up the e-book, video or article that will resonate most with a particular user, helping organizations to get the highest ROI on their existing content bank and giving customers a message in the format that works best for them. ML-powered MarTech also helps marketers to learn from their content wins and losses and make more of what performs best.
Getting to know users takes time, effort and empathy: brands should automate what they can so marketing teams can keep their focus on creative empathy as a driving force of demand marketing strategy.
3. Syncing internally to secure a sale
The issue
If a customer is ready to take a leap of faith with a business, every minute counts. Hand-offs from marketing to sales teams are a thing of the past, and a death sentence for customer loyalty.
One of the greatest barriers to building experiences that spark demand is a breakdown in internal coordination. Failure to coordinate between business areas means delays in experience, immobile data which doesn’t travel with the user, and irrelevant customer communications. Demand marketing can’t begin until internal communication streams are seamless and instantaneous.
The answer
A crucial step for demand marketing success is building a culture of constant communication between the different camps of the business. Adobe’s Marketo Engage can integrate with an organization’s CRM so sales and marketing stay in sync for the moments that count.
Maybe a user interacts with a key piece of content, or perhaps they express interest to a sales rep. Maybe they even start a buying journey but abandon it. At these critical moments, all players in the experience need to have the right information to take the right action, at the right time. With cutting-edge MarTech capabilities, brands can stay aligned at all times and even notify other teams about hot leads in an instant.
Quantify marketing impact with experience-led demand marketing
60% of CMOs in Fortune 1000 companies say they struggle to quantify the impact of their marketing. If marketing simply meets demand, then it fails to make an impact.
But if marketing efforts actually create demand, then the days of putting a price on experience-building are over: it becomes priceless.