Customer Experience, Transformation and Personalization at #MME16
Thinking about last week’s Oracle Modern Marketing Experience #MME16, there were three themes that stood out to me – Customer Experience, Digital Transformation and Personalization. The keynote content highlighted lessons learned in those areas and how to reframe your thinking as it relates to marketing, to business and to life. Needless to say, the themes set the stage for an amazing, content-rich event.
1. Customer Experience:
Troy Carter of Atom Factory made a valid point during his “Community, Connection, Consumption – Create Great Experience to Build Brand, Sales and Superstardom” keynote. “People remember how you make them feel, whether you’re a celebrity or a business. You need to nurture that relationship.” The honesty and real-ness that Troy projected was amazing, he didn’t read off of his planned presentation, it was all improvisation. He discussed disruption, entrepreneurship, advocacy, and custom experience. His experience boasted that customer experience is the key to maintaining any brand. If an artist takes the time to really invest in their fans, when they fall into a rut those fans will stick by them and cheer them on. The same goes for companies in business today, provide a great experience and you build loyalty.
Mark Hurd, CEO, Oracle Corporation, spent some time discussing the drivers for customer experience, the millennial rate of impact, and lost moments of engagement opportunity during his keynote, “Every Experience Matters.” It was a wake-up call for the audience as Mark highlighted that it is vital to make every customer experience count. Companies that figure this out first will win. A large challenge today is that siloed processes in big companies prevent them from delivering outstanding customer service, which in turn stifles growth. Mark spoke about the three ways to grow, “build better products, have lower prices, or provide better service.”
Main takeaway? Customer service is the easiest win and provides you with 5x the return than those with unhappy customers.
2.Digital Transformation:
Digital Transformation was a big one for both B2B and B2C companies. The opening #MME16 keynote, “The Global Corner Store: Customer Experience Comes Full Circle” focused on lessons learned from CMOs from major brands like Sears, Western Union, and Clorox. The session dove into how distribution, not just messaging, is the key to success in digital transformation. Eric Reynolds, CMO of Clorox made a very strong statement, “We wondered, could we fundamentally re-imagine how we do this? We knew we needed to change the way we talk to consumers. And in walked technology. Digital Transformation is incredibly hard, but don’t let fear get in the way. This is where the future is.”
He is so right about this, at ANNUITAS this is something we see often. Companies know they need to change and that technology is the future, but getting there is the hard part.
The best keynote, in my opinion, was, “Minding The Soft Stuff: How Marketing Transformation Moves Beyond Technology to Make It Real in a Complex Organization” with Dennis Startsev, Principal at Deloitte Digital and Jaemi Brmner, Marketing Technology and Capability Leader at Intuit. This keynote really hit home for me as I see many enterprise customers struggle after they purchase a marketing technology solution as too often technology is the starting point in a transformation instead of strategy. Jaemi discussed how to scope your digital transformation, assess and align your people and processes, and provided us with nine lessons for transforming you marketing. She stated that “when it comes to digital transformation capability is bigger than technology. Change won’t happen just because your implementation is flawless, you have to manage the change and make it happen.”
3. Personalization:
Personalization and how that relates to content was the final theme for #MME16. There was a keynote from Zach King, Filmmaker and Online Content Creator, on his journey and lessons learned. He has worked with multiple social media platforms and has had to transform his talents to adapt to each. His lesson, “products change, but stories last.” He also spoke about customer experience and getting the right message to the right audience, “Going viral isn’t a good strategy. Your audience isn’t going to stick, focus on growing a loyal audience.” However, the main takeaway was to be relatable. If you can’t relate to your audience or personalize your message they are not going to pay attention to whatever you have to say. With this in mind he started to make videos without any language in them so that no matter where in the world you watched them you could understand them. This simple tactic has helped his audience quadruple.
In the last keynote of #MME16, “A Conversation with Tyra Banks,”Andrea Ward, Oracle Marketing Cloud’s VP of Marketing had Q&A session with Tyra Banks, Founder & CEO of TYRA Beauty and Creative Executive Producer of America’s Next Top Model. It was an interesting keynote that focused on branding and how Tyra’s brand has evolved over the years. A lesson learned for Tyra was that “your brand isn’t what you say it is, your brand is what your audience says it is.” She looked at what her fans wanted from her and made it happen. She has personalized her brand to fit the fans. Her new beauty line, TYRA Beauty, is all about “beautytainment” and brings the feelings of fierce, funny, and heart to the consumer.
So what does this all mean for digital marketers today? We need to focus on how to best transform our companies, while still focusing on our customers and providing a level of personalization that other companies are not. Not being afraid to fail is key in all of this. Troy Carter’s Grandmother used to tell him, “You can’t fall off the floor” and that is true for all of us today. Technology changes every day, but understanding your customer, personalizing your message and building a strategy to grow with your customers will go the distance.
Author: Leah Brenner @LeahRBrenner Marketing Automation Architect, Technology, ANNUITIES
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