Digital technology disrupted the customer experience. Now, the role of marketing is evolving to keep up with the experience era of marketing.  

marketing is changing. are you ready?

As banks build better customer experiences to drive conversion, growth, and loyalty, the role of marketing is shifting to:

• understanding where customers are in their banking journey
• helping them advance through the customer experience

Bank marketers who leverage their data and technology to embrace these changes gain competitive advantage and win customers.

what is the experience era of marketing?

In this new era, customers are choosing brands primarily based on the experience, not advertising or branding. According to Forbes, 89 percent of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience, up from 36 percent a decade ago. Whether in a physical branch, ATM, over the phone, or through digital channels, brands that meet customer expectations with minimal friction are outpacing competitors in capturing new customers.

This shift is evolving marketing’s role from defining and communicating the brand value to also ensuring a consistent experience across all touchpoints, from advertising and social media, to shopping, and customer service. Savvy marketers are focusing on helping customers successfully navigate through the omnichannel brand experience, increasing conversion of new customers, retaining customers, and growing loyalty and value.

what are the benefits of delivering on experience marketing?

Forrester research found that while 80 percent of companies believe they deliver a “super experience,” only 8 percent of customers agree. And while this gap should be concerning to brands, the research also found that CX leaders who deliver a differentiated experience enjoy a 14 percent higher annual growth than CX laggards.

What is driving this growth? Frictionless and personalized experiences that not only meet customer expectations but keep them coming back and turn them into brand advocates.

how do you become an experience marketing organization?

As a digital experience agency and technology partner, we've collaborated with banks and financial services firms across the nation focused on elevating their brand and customers’ experience. From these partnerships, we have identified five essential components of an experience marketing ecosystem:

It all starts with data – bringing customer data together from the various silos that house marketing, product, transactions, channel usage and customer service information. Creating a unified customer data platform (CDP) with a single view of each customer across these silos enables the analytics and targeted communication that support great brand experiences.

According to Gartner, CMOs now invest two-thirds of their budget to support customer-data-driven strategies like customer retention and growth, programs enabled by CDPs. These data hubs integrate data across your systems and business silos to enable analytics, customer-facing applications and MarTech tools.

Once your customer data is in place, your analytics team can uncover the customer insights that will inform key decisions regarding marketing, acquisition targeting, cross-selling, and retention. KPIs like conversion rate, attrition rate, share of wallet, and trade area penetration rate help to enable strategic and tactical decisions.

Data-driven marketing programs often begin with an understanding of the key segments currently engaging the brand and new segments that represent the best opportunities for growth. As companies gain capabilities to focus on target segments and personalize offers and communications, they begin refining toward micro-segments and even one-to-one personalization as their data and tools enable.

where should I start?

Becoming experience marketer starts with understanding what capabilities you have in-house, prioritizing the gaps in your capabilities, and creating a plan for closing the gaps to deliver value. Contact us if you'd like to learn more or if you're interested in taking our readiness assessment to help you make the shift to an experience-driven marketing organization.