Flexible leaders are equipped with abilities to adapt under pressure—a necessary trait today. It’s difficult to prepare for every twist and turn but we believe that focusing on the areas you can control helps. And above all, deliver an excellent customer experience (CX). If you impress at every touchpoint—digital, in-person and beyond—you can weather virtually any storm.
If this pandemic has made one thing clear, it’s that the only constant is change. Fast and ongoing change. Customer behavioral shifts are evolving, and those brands that develop an approach to leverage this pace of change in “real-time” will be the most successful. And real-time is not addressing it within your annual strategic planning process over several weeks or months; it’s immediate.
With this significant shift in behavior in 2020, digital adoption and engagement have accelerated like never before. In fact, during the first eight-week span of the pandemic, a McKinsey study estimates that consumers leapt forward five years in their adoption of digital engagement. The shift won’t be temporary, and it doesn’t only affect consumers and B2C marketing efforts.
According to a parallel McKinsey B2B study, sales leaders indicated digital marketing efforts are now twice as important to their business success as they were before the pandemic. This forced digital adoption is greatly impacting the way consumers are engaging with brands… and the approach B2B must now go to market. And it is not just the go-to-market, it’s basic day-to-day tasks that are being challenged: in-home sales calls, job site visits, interactions with their distributor or manufacturer rep. How manufacturers and industry professionals adapt to the changing expectation will affect their long-term customer experience (CX) and overall brand perception.
What if tradeshows never came back? How would you shift your new product launch strategy or build your customer relationships or lead process? The new digital format may allow people to see the new products being launched, but it lacks the personal connection and touching and feeling that was the benefit of tradeshows and demo events. This is where companies need to change the game and transform their thinking and interactions with customers. It’s where a new CX should and could be born.
Major trade shows in all industries are being canceled, and many such as the Consumers Electronics Show (CES) have announced they are going to an all-digital format in 2021. Companies need to quickly transform the way they interact, sell and launch products. Take for example the leading construction surveying and measuring instruments brand; an industry where demoing their high-tech instruments in person is critical. They have looked at demos in a new light. By obtaining a credit card to reserve the shipment and trial of their expensive equipment, upon arrival, the local company sales rep sets up an appointment virtually to walk the prospective customer through the technology demo. If they keep the equipment, they get invoiced, if they return it, their credit card is never charged.
Business owners don’t want to accept less from their professional experiences than they are accustomed to getting from their personal experiences as a consumer. According to Retailwire, B2B professionals expect “interactions like sales calls and trade shows with brands to be closer to Amazon shopping experiences than mere virtual live events”.
When researching products, business-related customers’ preference for digitally enabled sales interactions has jumped significantly. Because of the forced lockdown, desire to socially distance and the improvements in video conferencing, businesses have shifted from face-to-face meetings to other forms of communication; and this is expected to continue even post-pandemic. And it’s not only the external world changing, the way businesses conduct their day-to-day inter-company tasks have been forced to change as well. Lack of communication and goal alignment is the number one cause of failed execution, so companies need to ensure they are continuing to find digital ways to highly engage and align their employees.
Corporations are also using this new digital world as an opportunity to optimize SG&A costs, with one big area of savings being travel: some forecasting a reduction of 30-50+% of travel costs going forward. They are dropping a portion of these savings directly to the bottom line. However, the more progressive ones are redirecting a large portion of those dollars into more critical growth areas. The primary focus is on initiatives that directly impact the CX of their best customers, and ideally therefore their company sales and profits. Dropping savings to the bottom line will make the company look good today but making investments in the right CX solutions will have better long-term value (more loyal customers, bigger purchases, newly acquired customers and higher mix and profits).
As online expectations have increased, it has placed greater importance of business success on having both a strong CX and content strategy. McKinsey found that “those suppliers who provide outstanding digital experiences to their buyers are more than twice as likely to be chosen as a primary supplier than those who provide poor experiences, and about 70 percent more likely than those providing only fair ones.” Given the importance of providing optimal online journeys, there is a need to create frictionless pathways from the first customer touchpoint all the way to purchases/reorder, ensuring there is quality content and guidance throughout the process, particularly in the critical early stages of the purchase process.
According to a recent Forbes article, three things are sure to be true going forward:
The C-Suite will need to focus more closely than ever before on customer advocacy as it becomes synonymous with the ability to achieve hyper-growth. In order to get closer to customer advocacy, companies must make it their #1 priority (and #1 investment) to gather intelligence related to the triggers of how their key customers act, feel and behave. As a result, the subsequent insights uncovered must quickly migrate from sales and marketing tools to becoming one of the most critical currencies fueling the future of business growth and brand relevance.
Hashtags once felt like a make-or-break element of a social strategy. But with the introduction of SEO search on platforms like Instagram, brand management teams need to rethink their strategy. Your words still count—but how you use them is changing. Learn more about the status of that pound sign (and your caption writing) in this rundown.
The new social platform from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta was ushered to the market as a way to capitalize on the growing unhappiness with Elon Musk’s Twitter. We discuss its massive debut—100 million registered users in the first five days of release—and give a quick-read overview of how major brands are reacting and whether yours should follow suit.
You’ve hired the right team. You’ve invested in a social strategy. Yet you’re still not seeing the results you want on TikTok, the current king of social channels. According to our in-house social media guru Hayley Kandik, it’s not you, it's the algorithm. Don’t be discouraged—with a few small tweaks, you can press forward with creating an identity for your brand on TikTok that serves both your goals and your audience.