This article originates from a presentation at the Revenue Marketing Summit in London, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.
While revenue marketing has only emerged as a concept fairly recently, itās something I've been actively working toward for years.
One thing that we all need to keep in mind is that it's not all about metrics, reporting, and KPIs ā the ultimate goal is to boost acquisition and sales. And how do we do that? Via an elevated customer experience.
Hereās a fun statistic: 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. We all know this from our own experiences as consumers.
Brand loyalty and customer experience are closely connected, which means that your job doesn't stop when a lead enters your CRM; itās only just begun.
Whether you're in B2B or B2C, youāll be cross-selling and upselling, and if you get the customer experience right, those buyers will remain loyal to you.
With that in mind, Iāll line up the five key trends you should be harnessing in 2023 whether youāre in B2B or B2C, and give you a few tips on how to harness these trends to boost your customer experience and drive your revenue marketing efforts.
These five key trends are:
- Omnichannel personalization
- Virtual Reality
- Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things
- Data privacy
- eCommerce
So, letās get into it!
Key trend one: Omnichannel personalization
To provide a bit of context, letās look at a couple of stats that show why personalization is so important in marketing today.
- āMarketers report that personalization boosts revenues by up to 15%ā ā Adweek
- āPersonalized calls-to-action convert 202% better than standard or default calls to actionsā ā HubSpot
In short, the more you personalize, the more you convert. The question is how to get personalization right through an omnichannel experience. While thereās no one-size-fits-all answer, there are certain steps we can all take.
The main thing to remember is that at every step, you have to have a single source of data to be able to do omnichannel personalization. That means that the key message that you deliver through your marketing campaigns needs to be the same as the message that the sales and customer support.
Which, in turn, needs to match everything thatās going on in your digital campaigns, events, brochures, direct sales, and so on.
Now personalization is obviously about making marketing more human, but the funny thing is, I'm talking about using technology to do that. Still, we canāt forget that weāre humans selling to other humans. Personalization just adds a human touch to nudge potential customers toward a sale.
Itās not always possible to personalize for every single prospect, so Iād recommend focusing on the most strategic 20%. How do you do that? Through data. To build a single source of truth that will allow you to personalize your approach, you need to take ownership of customer data and treat it like the treasure it is.
Don't forget that your personalization does not stop when a lead enters your system. Thatās when you begin the post-sale nurturing journey.
Key trend two: Virtual reality
ā80% of consumers feel positive about experiencing branded VR tactics.ā ā Touchstone Research
Iāve talked about personalization and the human approach, and now I'm telling you to use Virtual Reality (VR). That might sound like a contradiction, but I swear itās not.
Think back to the height of the pandemic ā we were all in our own little bubbles, living and working through a screen. Most brick-and-mortar stores were closed, but one of the tactics that helped businesses survive was VR. VR has seen a massive spike over the last few years, and if you're not using it in your company, you should be.
No matter what your brand, product, or service is, VR can have huge benefits. Take my company, SecurityHQ, as an example: weāre a managed security service provider.
All of our services can be bought and used over the internet, but during the pandemic our customers missed the experience of getting into a security operations center, seeing our analysts and big screens, and the sense of protection that comes with it.
We couldn't do that during the pandemic, so we came up with a new strategy to show our security operation centers to our customers around the world: we built a VR platform where a prospect can see what our work looks like without even stepping into our office.
