It is important for marketers to know and understand how search affects consumers and how they learn about your products, research before purchasing, and behave before and during their intent to acquire or buy your goods or services. This article is based on a chapter from my ebook Ever Seeking: a History and Future of Search.

It is important for marketers to know and understand how search affects consumers and how they learn about your products, research before purchasing, and behave before and during their intent to acquire or buy your goods or services. This article is based on a chapter from my ebook Ever Seeking: a History and Future of Search.

A key aspect of optimizing your customer experience is creating a consumer-centric mindset both in your organization and throughout the buying process. Doing this well requires listening to the way consumers are talking about your brand and its products or services, as well as their needs and requirements, commonly referred to as the voice of the customer, or VOC.

We are moments away from the answer to any question we might have. Who starred in that movie? Where should I eat for dinner? How soon can I get a product delivered to my house? With over 6,586,013,574 searches a day worldwide[i] and growing steadily as it expands across channels and methods such as voice-activate, search has become the way we find information or remember key facts.

Measuring the customer experience is definitely not as simple as measuring the results of a single tactic such as a website, email marketing campaign or in-store sales. The big challenge with measuring customer experience is that it needs to take into account all of your touch points. The opportunity is worth it, though, as it can show you how small improvements in specific points in the journey can make a huge difference.

Is it too soon to make a prediction for 2020?  We generally only think about the year immediately ahead, but while I was making my 2019 predictions for marketers, I realized that the next year was becoming clearer and clearer. 2020 will be the year of identity.

It’s once again the end of one year and the beginning of another. And with it, a chance to reflect on the previous 12 months as well as an opportunity to look forward into the next.  Inevitably, this leads to recaps, predictions, and many other ways to make sense of time passing.

Customer experience doesn’t just affect a single marketing channel or department within a company. Thus, unlike many other types of measurement and analytics efforts, building a customer experience measurement plan takes the efforts of many different parts of an organization. I should know; my agency works with clients to create custom customer experience measurement strategies and plans. This process can be divided into five steps.

I spend a lot of time explaining fairly technical people to people with a wide variety of technical knowledge. That’s just part of my job, and it’s quite interesting. It teaches me a lot about the subject matter to be able to explain it to people with varying levels of understanding. Inevitably, however, some of my descriptions are going to devolve into the usage of what many refer to as “buzzwords,” so here is my defense of them.

I am quoted in this article by ScaleFast regarding my expertise in personalization:

No matter which approach you go with, digital strategist Greg Kihlstrom recommends maintaining realistic expectations, testing your efforts and optimizing along the way. “While you may want every touchpoint in your customer experience to have some method of personalization, the only way to truly understand the effectiveness of what you are doing is to make sure there is a good test for each,” Kihlstrom says.

Think of search as a means to solve problems. Your search marketing approach needs to be focused on people that are seeking an answer, a fix, or something that can help them address a challenge they currently have. Advertising and other methods can be used to plant the “seeds” of interest in a product or service, but search is all about getting results (no pun intended) quickly.

Loyalty programs are effective at retaining customers by preventing them from turning to the competition. These programs can also maximize the lifetime value of a customer by offering incentives to spend more and buy more often.

Shifts in consumer behavior and technology have shaped both our relationship with brands, and the way that those brands seek to have relationships with their customers. Branding has followed and will continue to follow the trends and behaviors of the rest of society over time, and we are now on the cusp of a new era of the brand-consumer relationship, which I’m currently tackling in my follow-up to The Agile Brand.

The agile company doesn’t stand behind a rigid set of brand guidelines, and they know that in order to succeed, they must possess genuine corporate values that are demonstrated to their customers in tangible ways. Gone are the days when corporate social responsibility could be a bunch of words printed on a wall, programs listed on a website, but full of empty talk. Customers and employees alike demand more.

Measurement insights are a key part of optimizing your customer experience. At every step in the journey, it is critical that you understand what consumers are doing and how your channels and touch points are performing. It's also important that you not only have the ability to see what has happened in the past, but you also have actionable insights to help you make the best decisions moving forward.

Agile brands have the agile methodology to thank for their philosophy and approach. Agile’s rise in popularity and subsequent contributions to the world of software and the Web at large are wide-reaching and have changed the way we create and market products and services. The agile approach can be applied to many things other than software development, including marketing, and branding.

It is well understood that the better the data you have, the better the decisions you can make. For larger organizations with a lot of legacy infrastructure, this can require a lot of integration between systems and creating feedback mechanisms that tie everything together. The benefits of this can be dramatic, however.

Once when I was speaking on the topic of agile marketing at a conference, someone asked a question that should be addressed here: Doesn’t it go against the fundamentals of branding to be so agile, and adapt to change so easily? What about the core things that make up a brand? For this reason, we need to think of the Agile Brand as being nuanced.

As branding has evolved, the need for brands to tell unique and authentic stories that portray their mission and values has grown continually stronger. Jay Baer says, “If your stories are all about your products and services, that’s not storytelling. It’s a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger.”

Banking trends have evolved rapidly over the past two decades. As a result, banks are working harder than ever to keep up with the demands and preferences of their customers. These advancements include offerings that make banking more accessible, create the ability to bank more freely, and have a more tailored experience that is personalized to their needs.