Keep Your Eye On The Ball

I’ve been watching a lot of late night tennis this past week.

Even if you aren’t watching the Australian Open, the phrase “keep your eye on the ball” probably applies to a sport you can relate to.

When it comes to (digital) marketing, if only it were that easy.

With the amount of disruption in the market, from new competitors to media channels to different content formats to diverse consumer segments and shifting beliefs, it’s hard to know which is the “ball” that we need to keep our eye on.

The answer is likely all of the above, and then some.

But one approach that will help you nail it: keeping your eye on the customer.

Developing, refining and updating your understanding of your customer will help ensure your game plan is sound.  No matter the season.  No matter the competitor.  No matter the format.  Whether you’re trying to gain new customers or convince your current ones to stay and buy again from you.

Do you have a refreshed and well-articulated customer journey map that informs your digital strategy?

What are your customers trying to do?

What job does your product or service help them accomplish?

What experience do they have as they try to do this?

How does their experience make them feel, about themselves?  About your brand?

What obstacles do they face as they get after this job?

Are they finding the answers to their questions… from you?  Or are they coming up short, forcing them to look elsewhere?

While a customer journey map is not a new marketing or CX discipline, it’s one that is still at play.

Likely, you have customer journey maps, but are you using them?  Are they being reviewed and refreshed as competition changes, consumer mindsets and opinions shift, media channels increase?

Even if you are confident that you know what you have to do to succeed, change happens.  Change may be the only constant on which we can rely.

This gets back to keeping your eye on the ball, or, on the customer.

Being tireless about refining and improving your customer understanding and your customer journey maps will help ensure your strategies align with customer behavior and preference, that your messaging will connect and resonate at pivotal moments of influence, that your communications are placed in the media channels customers use in their path to purchase, that when you lead them to your site, or they find it on their own, you’re website design and content helps them progress towards a purchase, and that when they engage with your product, the experience they have delivers the desired result.

In fact, according to the 2019 Gartner Customer Experience Management Survey, CX leaders who effectively establish and use customer journey maps are 2.7 times more likely to identify a positive relationship between customer satisfaction and business impact.  Such leaders are also twice as likely to outperform their peers in terms of revenue and profit.

If you’d like to review or refine your customer journey map to help inform your digital strategy, let’s talk and get a game plan mapped out and make this your Grand Slam win.