Small Bets Deliver Big Wins in Optimizing the Customer Experience
New technologies are allowing marketers to adopt a more experimental mindset when it comes to collecting, analyzing, and acting on their users' data.
New technologies are allowing marketers to adopt a more experimental mindset when it comes to collecting, analyzing, and acting on their users' data.
What makes world-changing innovators like Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, or Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin different? Entrepreneur and best-selling author Peter Sims set out to find the answer to that question in collaboration with faculty at Stanford’s Institute of Design. Innovators, he found, follow similar approaches. Rather than starting with the “big idea,” they take experimental steps, making small bets, then quickly “course-correcting” from what is learned into another round of experimentation.
An experimental mindset, of course, is also what’s required in today’s new world of marketing, given the growing complexity of the digital ecosystem. We use data to test, improve, and then test again to better engage the consumer across every device, platform, and channel. That’s the essence of experimentation. But there is another issue at stake in today’s marketing. Technology advances that continue to rapidly shape the Internet have swept away many limitations in communications and commerce. Those advances have also transformed marketing and your ability to optimize the customer experience. Let’s explore how.
A new Gartner study on 2015 marketing spending identifies the customer experience as the “new competitive battleground,” with 89 percent of companies expecting to compete primarily on that basis by 2016, compared with 36 percent four years ago. Even more, it’s expected to be the top item in innovation spending in 2015. Nonetheless, recent research from Econsultancy on customer experience optimization reveals that CMOs and their marketing teams may have some significant hurdles to overcome. In their survey of more than 600 in-house marketing leaders and supply-side professionals, Econsultancy called optimizing the customer experience the “defining feature in this new era of marketing.” Yet key findings showed:
Marketing organizations are clearly in a time of transition as they engage with consumers across this omnichannel landscape. But I believe there may be another lesson to be learned in this research.
During recent years, we’ve witnessed vast changes in technology with an explosion in network bandwidth, and exponential gains in computing power and storage capacity. Almost instantly available computing power and network capacity have become the foundation for a tidal wave of new innovation. The good news is that today’s Internet-based technologies free the marketing organization to manage data and optimize the customer experience in ways never possible in the past. The bad news is that marketers may still assume they are limited by the constraints of the past – outdated ideas and legacy technologies. Consider these changes:
In essence, it’s now possible to collect, analyze, and act on much larger scale of user-level data than ever before. As a marketer, you can adopt an experimental mindset in testing and optimizing everything from marketing campaigns to online advertising. You are no longer limited to trend analysis only due to aggregate-level data, given the increasingly easier access to user-level data captured in individual customer profiles.
Mobile is a great case in point. Brands are under intense pressure to optimize for mobile users, and typically do so using Web-based applications and native mobile apps. Native apps, which are more intuitive and personalized, typically are hard-coded using software developer kits (SDKs). Any changes in the app must be sent back to the developer for re-coding, then re-submitted to an app store. Fortunately, new innovation in this space enables marketers to avoid this cumbersome process by testing mobile apps, then making modifications within minutes without using the SDK approach. As a result, the mobile app now can be optimized virtually in real time based on user behaviors – enabling brands to act at the increasing speed of consumers.
The evolving technology paradigm, combined with a truly stunning cycle of innovation in martech, is fundamentally changing the game for marketers. Yes, the customer journey is complex. But marketers now have the opportunity to optimize this experience using the footprints of data consumers leave behind with each interaction. It’s time to leave the past behind – and embrace experimental innovation.