From social channels and email marketing, to in-store touchpoints and mobile beacons, marketing experts and businesses have a wealth of creative tools and channels with which they can engage new and existing customers.
But while these tools have created more opportunities to connect with your target customer, they’ve also made the consumer relationship much more complex to manage than in previous years. As you begin to explore and these implement new tools, your brand message could deviate from its core, leaving your customers confused and disconnected from your brand.
Or at worst, the channels you’re currently using could miss your customer entirely, while more effective channels remain neglected.
As your new marketing strategy struggles to make a connection, your ROI falls, costs rise, and key stakeholders become frustrated, leaving your company knee deep in what we like to call The New Marketing Paradox.
From a marketing standpoint, a paradox can exist when new tools that are designed to help your brand grow actually stifle expected growth. Your numerous efforts to strengthen your brand have the opposite effect on these goals – your outreach dilutes itself and becomes white noise, your messages are ignored and sales suffer.
Experience Design: A Solution to the Paradox
The drive today is to implement a fluid, omnichannel marketing strategy. Easier said than done. The good news here is that you can avoid the paradox by crafting a purposeful experience design strategy.
Experience design is the integration of every aspect of the customer experience, with each element working together in a deliberate and purposeful way to convey your distinct brand personality. Successful experience design flows through three key focal points:
Focal Point #1: Your brand story
You can’t make a sound connection with your target customer without fully understanding and committing to your brand story. While sifting through all available channels, your core brand values should always remain in the driver’s seat of your experience design process.
Focal Point #2: Consistent brand alignment
Marketing moves faster than ever, and you’ll want to regularly reflect on your experience design strategy to make sure that your tools and touch points are accurately and consistently aligned with your brand story. Regular maintenance is key. The experience design process will regularly ask and answer the following questions:
- Are we making the best use of all of our resources? Content. Creative. Project Management. Marketing technology. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and your team and resources need to be well coordinated to support an effective omnichannel strategy.
- Are there channels we’re neglecting at the expense of focusing on others? For example, maybe you’re spending too much time and money on generating content and crunching data scenarios for your marketing automation campaign while your social media starts to stray off message? When it comes to leveraging multiple channels, stay in touch across the board.
- Are we staying on track and true to our core? As you explore new channels for sharing your brand story, it’s your authenticity that brings the experience design strategy together and drives it home – to the heart of your customer.
Focal Point #3: Your brand promise delivered with clarity and consistency
Your brand promise is now clear and consistent through all channels. From web search and social media, all the way to TV broadcast and the in-store experience, your brand message is delivered to the targeted customer with focus, purpose, and authenticity. Though your company will constantly evolve, your true brand promise will always remain, never wavering in its ability to drive customers back with an unforgettable experience.
So how do I use experience design to my advantage?
Navigating the various channels and touchpoints alone can be costly, time-consuming and often futile, which is why it’s important to align your marketing strategy with an expert in experience design. Mood Media specializes in providing end-to-end experience design solutions to help businesses of all sizes create lasting customer connections, backed by more than 80 years of proven brand marketing experience.
Don’t let the new marketing paradox stifle the goals of your marketing strategy. Bring customers back time and time again with a comprehensive experience design process focused on brand clarity, consistency, and purpose.
How will you solve the new marketing paradox?
To learn more, take a look through our new Executive Thinkbook, and click here for a complimentary Experience Design consultation.
– Submitted by Kimberly Wolff, Vice President of Marketing & Business Operations