Fixing Your 5 Most Impactful Martech Imperfections

You Picked Your Top Five Marketing Technology Priorities Because You Haven’t Perfected Them Yet. Here’s How to Do So.

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Philip Mandelbaum
08/03/2022

A woman with brown hair, turtleneck sweater and backpack, looking up to the sky, holding a yellow umbrella to protect herself from the rain, seen coming down

Leaders in marketing, digital strategy, sales, customer engagement, information technology and operations have spoken: the top five marketing tech (martech) priorities are personalization (68%), customer and employee data management (60%), predictive and proactive outreach (57%), lead nurturing and conversion (54%), and content quality and value (50%). What does this mean? If you’re like most senior leaders today, it means your future investments in martech should improve at least one of the aforementioned. Unfortunately, less than half of senior executives believe their marketing and CX teams collaborate successfully with those responsible for their marketing technology. Fortunately, at Customer Engagement Insider we don’t solely run the survey and release the report, we ask carefully constructed questions and — based on the responses — identify where you’re most likely in need of innovative tech solutions. Then, we provide those solutions. Which is a good thing, because “organizations that have fully reoriented operations, delivery models, and technology investments to meet new [customer] experience demands grow their profitability year on year by at least six times their industry peers!”

Herein, you’ll find everything you need to know to improve your marketing:

Personalization, throughout the customer lifecycle
Data management, analysis and use
Outreach, predictively and proactively
Lead management and conversion, from reach through sales (and beyond)
Content quality, increasing its value

But First, The Context

To accurately understand the State of Marketing Technology, Customer Engagement Insider conducted a survey in May 2022. The survey asked leaders responsible for marketing, digital strategy, sales, customer engagement, information technology, and operations to share their perspectives on key marketing technology goals, challenges, and benchmarks. The survey spanned companies of all sizes and most industries.

Example respondent job titles included chief marketing officer, vice president of marketing, senior manager of customer loyalty, SVP and senior operations officer, vice president of customer service, vice president of sales, head of APAC business, head of customer experience, chief customer officer, senior director of customer experience tech, director of channel business, and senior digital product manager.

Black pavement and dark green grass, separated by white cement

The biggest takeaway, we quickly discovered, is what I’m calling the great personalization divide — because there’s a Brobdingnagian disconnect between how well companies think they’re personalizing user and customer experiences and how well they probably actually are. While seven in 10 brands say their sales and CX engagements are appropriately personalized and nearly eight in 10 say the same of their marketing outreach, only 15% of consumers feel the majority of their brand interactions are personalized.

Why? Bad data, mainly.

So, it shouldn’t surprise you (or anyone) that — despite their claims of already providing personalization — the very same brands report that personalization and data management are their greatest weaknesses (“priorities”). Their third, fourth and fifth are also related:

You can’t perform predictive, proactive outreach without quality customer data, and with personalization you can increase the effectiveness of that outreach
You can’t successfully nurture and convert leads into customers (and, ideally, brand ambassadors) without providing a data-informed, personalized customer experience at every touchpoint
You can’t even consider delivering ROI on a digital marketing campaign without quality, value-add custom content

And this is where your martech stack comes in.

The Importance of Marketing Technology

With the right martech stack, you can use the zero- and first-party data you collect from all your engagements to deliver the most pertinent, targeted content, at the right time, on the right platform and across all platforms, for a consistent, personalized omnichannel experience. Not bad, considering brands engaged in omnichannel marketing benefit from a 287% higher purchase rate.

In fact, with the right martech stack, you can tackle all five of the top digital marketing priorities — more efficiently and effectively. Businesses using marketing automation to generate leads on social media alone save more than six hours per week. Lead nurturing using marketing automation produces 152% higher click-through rates. And there are automation and other tech-based opportunities across all digital marketing, sales and CX functions.

There’s a reason the martech industry is valued at more than $345 billion.

How to Enhance Your Digital Outreach, Sales and CX by Overcoming Your Five Biggest MarchTech Obstacles

Exploring the Intersection of Personalization, Data, Predictive Outreach, Lead Conversion and Content Marketing

Personalization was the Association of National Advertisers ‘marketing word of the year’ in 2019 and the buzz has only heightened since, with a third of all companies now devoting half their marketing budget to this purpose. Of course, at least since COVID, consumer expectations have changed — and automating the insertion of your contact’s name into an email salutation is no longer cutting it!

In other words, while your customers and prospects still do want personalization, they don’t always feel like they’re getting it — and, when they do, it’s often too frequent or too much.

“Consumers can be underwhelmed by marketing efforts to personalize interactions, and there is also a perspective that more personalization does not necessarily provide a better experience,” warned the ANA back in 2019. “There is some consumer skepticism, lack of understanding, and even mistrust over the use of data for marketing purposes.” And, unfortunately, consumer distrust has grown alongside the use of marketing personalization:

9 in 10 consumers are “concerned” or “very concerned” about the privacy of their data online
9 in 10 consumers say they’ll ”disengage” with a company that breaks their trust

Companies that meticulously tiptoe this tightrope, then, are the ones delivering the best customer experience, developing the fiercest customer loyalty, and defeating their competitors in all key categories.

How? By refusing to force it (on behalf of upselling existing customers, ‘reaching’ new consumer categories, or capitalizing on trends) — and demonstrating consistency and authenticity across all (personalized) consumer interactions.

To put it another way, as important as personalization may be, it, alone, is insufficient. Which is why a Google search for “personalization tools,” for instance, produces a blog post from Proof Technologies featuring 30 examples of “web personalization” tools that all do entirely different things.

So, instead of duplicating Proof’s efforts, I’ve compiled a list of the best automation tools across platforms and throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Four cookies laid flat on a surface: one chocolate, one sugar with sprinkles, one chocolate chip, and one plain sugar

To personalize anything, you need customer data.

And customer data is becoming tougher and tougher to obtain. For years now the vast majority of tracking cookies have been rejected by browsers, and every day more and more consumers are blocking them on their own. In other words, with increasing customer sophistication, massive corporate and government data breaches and increasingly stringent global regulations, the ‘cookiepocalypse’ is upon us, whether we like it or not.

Fortunately, with 83% of brands still (ignoring their customers wishes and) relying on third-party cookies, this means you have a lucrative opportunity to distinguish yourself simply by listening — and embracing the alternative: zero- and first-party data, sourced and utilized respectfully, ethically and lawfully.

So, think like a customer and ask yourself: How would I want my data treated? Then:

Honor and manage user consent
Honor and manage user deletion and data suppression requests
Track all data collection, storage and uses
Implement identity resolution tools to streamline data subject access requests
Implement Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detection tools to identify and fix customer data errors
Take the time to distinguish between your data wants and needs
Use only the necessary data in the most responsible manner

Finally, to meet privacy regulations, prepare for future requirements from Google, Apple and other browser, platform and app providers, and optimize not only your customer (and employee) data but how you use it, invest in a customer data platform. With a CDP, you can seamlessly standardize, validate, deduplicate, consolidate and leverage your data to build profiles, create segments and enable better targeting and personalization.

Some of the best customer data platforms are available from:

Or, you can stick with the industry leader, Segment from Twilio, or demo either of the self-proclaimed Segment alternatives, open-source Jitsu or no-code CustomerLabs.

With optimized data, you can make better decisions about who to target, as well as how, where and when; deliver personalized, predictive and proactive outreach; and increase your lead generation and conversion rates — all top priorities of today’s marketing leaders.

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On Employee Data

Oh, and by the way, data is also key to talent recruitment, corporate training, company culture, employee experience (unlike the NBA), and staff retainment — which is why customer data was not the only analytical priority identified through our study.

To use your employee and applicant data to attract top talent, you need to stand out (there are more than a million employers on Glassdoor) — and stand out for the right reasons. So, in addition to offering a comprehensive benefits package, unique perks and training and advancement opportunities, you need to promote your key differentiators (and employee-centric work environment). Here’s how:

Shed the corporate veneer and get personal. Speak to potential hires and, whenever possible, let your employees do the talking.
Get creative in telling your brand story — whether you’re detailing a new digital marketing job, defining an ideal candidate or soliciting applications. Use videos, gifs and graphics, share anecdotes and testimonials, ask unique questions, and encourage atypical responses.
Highlight your company culture and employee experience. Show potential hires what would be expected of them — and what they could expect from you and their coworkers. This will demonstrate your commitment to your workers as well as help you filter out potential candidates who would not excel in your work environment.
Promote the perks. Display them prominently, and provide as much detail as possible.
Think like an applicant. I’ve been a hiring manager, and I’ve applied (successfully, and unsuccessfully) for jobs. One approach I’ve always taken, which, as a job candidate I’ve rarely experienced, is to base recruitment efforts not on HR policy, historical practice or industry standards but on what will entice top talent to truly engage with your application; the best and easiest ways are to (a) never require applicants to submit a resume or curriculum vitae and complete an online form with the very same information; allow applicants to submit their LinkedIn or Indeed profile, or a video resume, instead of the standard resume or CV; never require a cover letter, since they typically regurgitate what’s in the resume or CV; and, in lieu of a cover letter, require answers to a short series of customized, thought-provoking questions that can determine not only the applicant’s qualifications but their potential fit with your company culture.

Then, to retain your top talent, collect and leverage historical and real-time employee data to continually promote and improve employee experience and morale via these five tactics:

Providing not only a diverse but safe, equitable and inclusive work environment by prioritizing DEI from recruitment through onboarding and from ongoing training through retainment and promotion
Offering work flexibility and other competitive benefits and personalized perks
Facilitating work/life balance and family health and wellness
Fostering a strong company culture through tactics 2 and 3, along with optional, frequent and unique in-office and/or virtual employee engagement opportunities
Maintaining consistency and authenticity in all employee recruitment marketing

Remember: What’s most important isn’t which benefits or perks you provide, but that you listen to, respect and value your employees and reward hard work.

So, instruct your HR team to start by developing an employee survey using AskNicely, GetFeedback, LimeSurvey, Qualaroo, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, or Zoho Survey to gather as much initial info as possible. Next, leverage that data to ascertain what your employees most appreciate (or would most appreciate) and identify creative incentives and other workplace solutions you can reasonably offer beyond the traditional benefits.

You might even see some unexpected benefits; according to Social Media Today, content shared by employees receives 800% more engagement than content shared by brand channels!

To streamline and optimize all your HR efforts, skip the benefits consulting company and empower your on-staff talent management professionals by investing in one of the top human resources software solutions, like:

Two boards connecting via electric currents

To deliver personalized, predictive, proactive customer outreach, you need marketing automation tools that leverage the optimized data in your CDP — with or without Zapier.

You could shoot for 360-degree marketing automation software from AdRoll, Campaigner, Customer.io, Eloqua, HubSpot, Keap, Marketo, Salesforce, Sendinblue, or Zoho. Or, depending on your budget, you could finetune each marketing outreach tactic through specialized martech solutions. But, first, you need to establish which marketing disciplines are most effective for this outreach, designed to increase engagement and brand awareness, improve brand reputation, and yield more potential leads to your website or landing pages. The answer:

Search engine optimization, or SEO
Social media marketing
Influencer marketing
Digital advertising

On SEO and SEO Tools

There are at least eight-billion searches a day on Google alone, search engines remain the starting point for nearly seven in 10 online experiences, and organic search drives more than half of all website traffic. Not only that, SEO can reduce the cost of customer acquisition by 87.41% because there are no third parties gatekeeping your customer data or taking money to host or promote your content.

Unfortunately, 75% of users don’t click past the first page of search results — and while the number-one position on a Google search results page (SERP) can generate a click-through rate (CTR) of 34.2%, results on the second page of a Google search receive less than 1% of all clicks.

Since Google rewards sites that answer users’ questions, address their pain points and deliver products or services they seek, your SEO content needs to deliver on what it promises.

So, ensure all your headlines, meta descriptions and URLs describe what users will find when they click. Not what you think they want to see (that’s clickbait), or what you think Google wants to see (that’s keyword stuffing).

In addition, follow these SEO best practices:

Add structured data from schema.org (and be sure to test it first)
Register on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit an XML sitemap to each
Sign up for Google Analytics to track site changes and monitor your site’s results against your KPIs
Identify your target keywords, and incorporate them in the most relevant parts of your site, paying careful attention not to keyword stuff
Create short URLs, incorporating the primary keyword for each page
Add alt text to all images
Add outbound links to authoritative sites, as well as inbound links to other helpful parts of your site
Noindex, Nofollow any pages you don’t want search engines to crawl
Monitor your results against your KPIs
Practice ongoing kill/keep/refresh, deleting outdated or irrelevant content, keeping your best-performing and most strategic content and refreshing content that could perform better with simple improvements or updates
Continually monitor for and address Google crawl errors and broken links
Build backlinks by guest posting and appearing on/in podcasts, radio, tv and online publications

To streamline your efforts to develop, monitor and optimize SEO content, you need three types of tools:

For creating content based on what your user personas are searching online, invest in an SEO tool such as Ahrefs, Moz or Semrush
For analyzing your performance, identify your most (and least) effective sources of new site visitors and track the effect of your site changes, there’s a free analytics tool that integrates with just about every CMS on earth, outshines any paid option and demonstrates your allegiance to Google, Google Analytics
For conducting deeper, forensic, technical SEO analysis, you need a website auditing tool like SEO Spider from Screaming Frog

An exotic spotted brown frog, resting on a blanket, wearing a hat

On Social Media Marketing and Social Media Automation Tools

If you’re following the customer lifecycle, you’re posting regularly on social media — and, if you’re doing it right, you’re leveraging brand ambassadors (satisfied customers) and influencers to boost your reach, awareness and engagement. Indeed, with the content you create you inform, engage, inspire and empower your prospects and customers, and while customers on your website and email lists have already passed the first stage of the cycle and know your brand, the vast majority of the billions of people on social media don’t know what you do or even who you are. This is why social media is critical to your predictive, proactive outreach.

And these are your ‘eight steps to (social media marketing) perfection:’

Develop a strategy, first. Then implement, analyze, iterate and optimize. Every successful social media marketer has a plan, based on the company’s mission; core values; value proposition; products and/or services; branding and digital marketing strategies; target audiences and their pain points, needs, goals and buying triggers; audience demographics on each social media platform; and each social media platform’s best use cases.
Don’t set it and go. Monitor and react. Many of the most successful companies on social media don’t merely stick to the plan, they continually seek out and take advantage of ever-changing trends.
Trust your social media team. If you trust your recruitment and hiring processes, you should be able to count on the people you’ve hired to strategize, implement and analyze your efforts on social media. If your company requires a litany of approvals before anyone can post, you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities — and stifle the creativity of your team.
Analyze and iterate. Each of your social media posts represents a learning opportunity. By tracking and analyzing your data over time, you can begin to identify audience trends and adjust accordingly, phasing out less popular campaigns and investing further in the most effective approaches.
Take risks, and develop a personality. You should have defined your brand voice already. All you need to do, then, is apply that voice on social media, consistently, and with vigor. Not every trend or snippet of industry news requires a response, but when you do participate, post with confidence and tell it like it is. This is the only way you’ll build that coveted ‘thought leader’ reputation. Also, it’s the best way for the world to learn what you stand for.
Use influencers and customers. Not in a manipulative way. This benefits everyone. Forty percent of teens trust influencers more than their friends, and 92% of all consumers consider peer reviews and user feedback to be the most credible source of purchase information. In other words, what sells is seeing other people using and discussing the product. What sells is showcasing characters that consumers either admire (i.e., influencers) or with whom they can relate (i.e., average users). So, create an influencer program with perks for participants, and keep an eye on those tags from customers because they’re (obviously) the best source of user-generated content.
Create community. There are multiple ways to do it and you just need one that works for you, whether it’s sparking conversation in the comments section of your posts, creating and curating Facebook Groups or Reddit Communities, or building a forum or social networking space for customers and prospects to congregate. The more people talk about what you do, the more the excitement grows — and with excitement often come conversions.
Demonstrate a commitment to your customers. If, for instance, you upgrade your product or service in response to customer feedback, tell your customers! It means you’re listening, and you care.

Now, if you understand the critical role social media should play in your marketing and business strategies, but don’t have the bandwidth to manually manage all your campaigns, consider one of these seven top social media automation tools:

A female model and influencer, topless, with a white cowboy hat, big gold sunglasses, a chunky gold chain and big hoop earrings, poses in the shadows

On Influencer Marketing and Influencer Marketing Platforms

Influencer culture isn’t going anywhere. About nine in 10 Gen Zers and millennials initially learn about things they want to purchase on social media — and nearly half of all teens trust influencers more than their friends. But that’s not all: their parents are now listening; 84% of C-suite and VP-level executives now use social media to make purchasing decisions, and 92% of all consumers consider peer reviews and user feedback to be the most credible source of potential purchase information.

Fortunately, user-generated content is incredibly valuable (according to Nosto, nearly 10 times more so than even influencer marketing), and influencer marketing creates a 520% return on every dollar spent!

This is why nearly nine in 10 companies plan on working with a social media star in the next year, 71% intend to increase their influencer marketing budget, and almost 20% expect to dedicate more than half of their entire marketing budget to influencer marketing. And why your digital marketing team can no longer ignore this phenomenon.

Here’s how to optimize your influencer marketing program:

Prioritize ongoing influencer relationships and communities. When you find an influencer that loves your product or service, showcases your brand in line with your messaging and maintains strong engagement with their followers, consider offering them a long-term contract. These influencers can generate higher ROI because of the authentic connection they’ve developed with their online communities, and by nurturing these relationships and communities you can develop these influencers into brand evangelists or ambassadors.
Always demonstrate transparency, authenticity, consistency and empathy. It’s become ever more obvious that even the most popular and compelling influencers can’t stir up enough fervor for a product or service they don’t genuinely endorse, so do your research and only build relationships with influencers with active, engaged followers and whose values align with yours.
Equitably employ and include a diversity of influencer marketers. Although some brands have found incredible success emphasizing the exclusivity of what they offer, even while diversifying the models in their ads, creating a culture of inclusivity (and equity) is what allows your target audience to connect with your brand. As they say: diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance. So, as you strive to maintain transparency, authenticity and empathy, focus also on equitably including everyone — starting with who comprises your marketing team.
Incorporate influencer marketing across channels and devices. Omnichannel marketing represents a rethinking of the customer lifecycle, with a focus on providing a seamless and personalized user experience across all channels relevant to the buyer journey. For organizations invested in influencer marketing, and particularly those who’ve nurtured influencer communities and developed brand ambassadors, this means leveraging your influencers and their stories across all platforms, and from lead generation to sales and customer experience.
Invest in an influencer marketing platform. By 2016, 70% of influencers already felt the most effective way to collaborate with brands was through an influencer marketing platform, or influencer marketing hub; by 2020, there were 1,360 agencies dedicated entirely to influencer marketing. Unless you’re part of the mere 22% of brands that think it’s easy to find the right influencer, this means you should probably demo at least two of the following highly rated options: CreatorIQ, impact.com, Tagger Media, Traackr, or Upfluence.

A woman in a long, black puffy jacket walks past a wall of flyers and advertisements

On Digital Advertising and Programmatic/SEM Tools

Although digital advertising is not as effective or efficient as, say, influencer marketing, Google estimates that for every $1 spent on Google ads, businesses receive $8 in profit — and nearly six in 10 Millennials report buying something based on an online ad.

You could log in to each and every social media platform’s advertising interface; or, you could invest in SEM and programmatic advertising.

For SEM, there’s no better solution than Google Ads. For programmatic, many recommend Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP or Taboola; for most organizations, I recommend AdRoll.

AdRoll markets itself as a “comprehensive marketing platform… powered by AI and machine learning,” includes expansive cross-channel functions like remarketing and retargeting, display and social media ads, UTM tracking, abandoned cart recovery and consent management, and provides access to more than 200 leading ad networks and two-billion social media users
Best known for its “Around the Web” and “Recommend for You” sponsored ads and links, Taboola uses AI to deliver native advertising, or paid content marketing designed to resemble articles and drive more traffic to your website; Taboola provides access to thousands of websites and apps within its publisher network, but due to pricing is most often used by content publishers and brands with larger budgets and bigger audiences
Adobe Advertising Cloud, another higher-priced option, allows advertisers to holistically plan, buy, manage and optimize ads, “including premium and private inventory deals,” using a single interface

Read this for all 10 types of digital advertising, and how to measure your digital ad performance.

To optimize your lead generation and conversion efforts, you need to enrich your customer data and create empathic, personalized experiences across your website, landing pages and email and text messages.

UX Design

High search rankings, even based on the best SEO, don’t last if the content doesn’t provide value to consumers. Though more users may visit the site, they leave quickly, feeling disappointed and even betrayed by the brand’s failure to speak to their needs and goals. Needless to say, these users don’t buy anything, and they don’t return.

A well-conceived, frictionless UX design, on the other hand, can raise customer conversion rates up to 400%!

Of course, designing for user experience is easier said than done. You first have to understand your customers, and how your site performs today.

Where have your customers found the most value, and why?
What pages inspired users to leave, and why?

To gather insights on your customers:

Use A/B testing tools to verify which site features drive the most conversions or keep users on the site the longest (more on this later)
Employ, monitor, analyze and leverage the learnings from eye tracking, emotion recognition, brain activity and mouse tracking technologies, such as my two favorites Element Human and Cool Tool
Employ, monitor, analyze and leverage the learnings from feedback widgets that provide actionable insights based on user behaviors; consider Usersnap, Wootric from InMoment or, if you run a larger, enterprise-level organization, Medallia

'The Optinmonster,' created with five hands and arms, with a black background

Lead Capture/Conversion Optimization

You’ve done all the necessary legwork, and a new user is on your website. Now, it’s up to your site (or optin pages) to:

Convert the user to a lead
Provide you with additional user information to better segment your audiences and personalize your lead nurturing and conversion efforts

Imagine you’re a tech provider, with three tools designed for three unique functions. For each tool, you have a different target audience. For each tool and target audience, you build two web pages designed to generate leads by speaking to how the tool can solve for the audience’s pain points, needs and goals:

A public, on-site landing page accessible via website navigation, breadcrumbs and intrasite linking or direct linking from SERPs, social media, email or text
A No Search, No Follow optin page for site users from audience-specific paid ads

To create these pages, you can easily use your CMS. Or, you can invest in Optinmonster, the best tool built for lead capture/conversion optimization.

Optinmonster integrates with any CMS that allows for code embedding, features dozens of templates and campaign optimization options, and offers a variety of what they call “campaign types:”

Lightbox popups
Floating bars
Inline forms
Sidebar forms
Slide-in scroll boxes
Content lockers
Coupon wheels
Fullscreen welcome mats

Data Enrichment

Looking for better data? If you google “data enrichment tools,” you’ll find best-of lists topped by BeenVerified, Clearbit and Datanyze; alternatives include LeadGenius and FullContact.

LeadGenius is a cloud-based data enrichment tool providing:

Contact and account monitoring, leveraging tracking signals, events and triggers from ads, press releases, social behavior, job posts and more
Competitive intelligence and purchase intent, with alerts when target accounts engage with competitive brands online

Also an SaaS-based identity resolution solution, FullContact enables brands and marketing platforms to enrich personal identifiers using hundreds of identity and marketing attribute queries and a unique Identity Graph feature.

But, let’s be honest: You don’t even need a data enrichment tool if you use a CDP.

A man in a patterned white buttondown shirt stands diagonally before a whiteboard, pausing in the midst of a drawing out an email drip campaign sequence

Email and SMS Marketing

Since the advent of social media, marketing prognosticators have warned of an impending end to the original electronic message. But as we’ve seen: email is not dead. Ninety-nine percent of us check it everyday. And that’s why the email marketing market is expected to more than double by 2027.

Of course, long gone are the days of dropping hundreds of email addresses into the Bcc section of a text email and mass-blasting your contacts from a browser-based email provider. Everyone knows you need an email marketing tool. The question is: Is the free version of Mailchimp enough, or should I invest in a high-powered CRM?

The truth is: for individuals and small businesses, Mailchimp is definitely enough — and since its pricing is based on number of contacts, it can scale with you. Enterprise-level organizations, on the other hand, need more.

A CRM, or customer relationship management tool, tracks and reacts to direct lead and customer interactions like new purchases, email link clicks and customer service communications. Coupled with a CDP, this marketing, sales and CX tool empowers you to better personalize all of your communications.

Here are some of the best (demo them all):

A man of color holds up his credit card as he shops online on his laptop

Sales and CX

Once you’ve converted a lead into a paying customer, you have the opportunity to begin developing loyalty, in the hopes of retaining them and, ideally, creating a brand ambassador or influencer. Of course, you also have the opportunity to turn them off completely. In other words: this stage of the customer lifecycle represents a balancing act between continually engaging the customer and being perceived as pushy. And how your team responds can make or break your business.

Indeed, 96% of consumers will leave a brand after one bad customer service experience, and 92% will also post their complaints on social media. But that’s not all:

68% of consumers are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand known to offer good customer service
78% of consumers will do business with a company again after a mistake if the company’s customer service is excellent
Investing in new customers is between 500% and 2500% more expensive than retaining existing ones

And, according to our own research at Customer Engagement Insider, if you prioritize the customer experience you provide, you’ll immediately position yourself ahead of your competitors.:

Only two in 10 consumers (21.65%) believe companies provide transparent communication
Almost half of consumers (40.72%) say they receive some communication or empathy — but no “solutions” — when experiencing product delays

Companies that do CX correctly don’t stop at call centers and chat bots; they strategize cross-functionally for customer success and the highest customer lifetime value. How? By:

Asking questions and listening
Conducting customer service surveys
Measuring customer satisfaction scores
Developing and utilizing a voice-of-the-customer program
Providing easy access to self-service portals
Leveraging the information obtained to improve products, services, marketing and sales messaging, and the UX and CX they provide
Identifying and addressing gaps and opportunities in processes and cross-departmental coordination
Always focusing on the customer, and not the sale

To ensure you’ve positioned yourself to benefit from brand loyalty, ask yourself the following questions:

Have we included social media follow and share buttons on our website and marketing emails?
Does our CX team engage with customers and prospects on social media and in comments?
Do we offer customers exclusive perks such as discounts and birthday gifts that keep them coming back?
Do we offer additional perks for posting positive reviews, posting about us on social media, or making repeat purchases?
Do we have a referral program that makes it easy for customers to connect us with more prospects?
Do our customer support agents make themselves easily accessible via email, phone and live chat? Do they find solutions to problems?
Do we request and post user-generated content?
Do we have a process whereby we monitor, log, analyze and iterate based on user-, customer- and influencer-generated content and reviews?0

To make cross-selling, upselling and customer relationship management easier, you could:

Rely heavily on the combination of any of the top CDPs and CRMs
Put your money in Salesforce, the most powerful CRM on the market, serving more than 150,000 organizations worldwide
Follow Hubspot’s advice — to use Hubspot Service Hub plus these 10 additional tools
Invest in Freshdesk, Help Scout, Intercom, LiveAgent, ZenDesk or Zoho Desk, the most comprehensive customer support tools (in addition to Hubspot’s)

For more on maximizing CX, get the seven steps to customer success.

To optimize the quality and value of your custom content, you need to leverage your customer data to develop a content marketing strategy that aligns with your 360-degree digital marketing strategy, for use in your personalized, predictive and proactive outreach and lead nurturing and conversion efforts.

According to Marketing Insider Group:

The number one reason that content marketing is important is that your customers appreciate it. Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing, drives six times higher conversion rates, and has the potential for a 7.8-fold boost in web traffic. The reality is, content marketing has fostered the customer-centric reality we’re now operating in. From well-researched white papers to podcast series listeners can’t live without, content is changing the relationship between the brand and consumer.

Plus, nine in 10 consumers find custom content useful, and creating and promoting it costs 62% less than traditional marketing.

Even better, if you use the recommended tools and follow these steps and best practices, you can expect to outperform the 43% of marketers who don’t yet have a content marketing strategy at all.

6 Steps to Content Marketing Success

Develop your brand story, based on why and how you were created, your core values, your value proposition, the value you provide consumers, beyond your product or service offerings, what makes you special or unique, and how you define your brand personality and voice
Define your audiences, based on your user, lead and customer data, competitive research, feedback from your sales and CX teams, and customer survey and focus group results; develop user personas including personal and professional background, user environment, preferred content types, attitudes, interests, motivations, needs, goals and pain points, and buying triggers; and map out the customer journey, considering the different paths a consumer might take toward making a purchase, your prospects’ and customers’ thoughts, feelings and actions at each stage of the customer lifecycle, and how you’ve historically retained and developed loyalty among customers
Establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART) content marketing goals, beginning with your overall business goals, proceeding to your long-term strategic marketing goals and concluding with your content marketing and campaign-specific goals; identify the appropriate performance benchmarks and KPIs; and outline your expectations for each stage of the customer lifecycle
Audit your existing content
Outline your content development processes and distribution channels, and define roles and responsibilities, content types and publishing/distribution cadence
Develop your editorial plan, starting with pillar content and increasing specificity and complexity, and use your project management software to build out a master calendar, as well as the timeline for each campaign, project and assignment, assigning all roles from development to approval and from distribution to monitoring, analysis, iteration and optimization.

A brown table with a small white coffee cup filled with black coffee, a small white dish with gold safety pins, an an open annual calendar book

Content Creation Best Practices

It’s not enough for your customers and prospects, or Google, to simply develop your website and content hubs according to content marketing and SEO best practices; each and every piece of web content you create needs to be optimally structured as well. Here’s what to include:

Title, in 56 characters or less, with primary keyword and a popular phrase (e.g., “How to,” “Why,” “The Top…”) — the how-to article is the most popular content format
Meta description, in 156 characters or less, with primary keyword, teasing the content
Keyword in first paragraph
Headlines (H1, H2s, H3s, and H4s) with keywords, and lists — list headlines generate more pageviews than any other
Keywords throughout the content
Frequent lists within the content — posts containing frequent lists generate 70% more traffic
Images, related to the content themes, with alt text, including keywords if possible — posts that include images generate two to four times more traffic, 30% more shares, and 25% more backlinks
Internal links to related content
Outbound links to other high-authority, non-competing sites
Call to action (CTA)
Short URL, with keyword
Long read — long-form content generates 200% more pageviews
Article, FAQ and Speakable structured data from schema.org

Content Creation Tools

For video, still the most important medium, I recommend Adobe Premiere Pro, the industry standard, with desktop and mobile versions; my kids — who create videos all day long and have amassed cult followings on TikTok — recommend Videoleap, Videoshop and/or CapCut for doing what they do on the go
For creating graphics like thumbnails, icons, web and social banners and posts, whitepaper and brochure templates and more, I recommend Adobe, known across industries for its incomparable design apps Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign; of course, there are time-saving apps even the most novice designer can use to build beautiful visual elements, and the best one is Canva, with its countless free templates and graphics, as well as teams, projects and brand kits for project management
To double check your writing, use Grammarly, with its “writing assistant,” automated grammar checker and word processing app plugins; to A/B test and optimize your headlines and subject lines, use CoSchedule