Consumer behaviour has changed significantly over the past few years. Businesses are fighting for shoppers’ attention and working overtime trying to achieve stickiness with their customers. This is a result of today’s consumer having a lot more options when shopping and a lot higher expectations of their experiences with your brand. As well, consumers are primarily Mobile and rely on Social Proof to choose their favorite brands and make their purchases. The experience consumers are looking for requires brands engage them with relevant and personalized content. Not only does content need to be relevant and personalized to win consumers’ attention, the content needs to flow across multiple channels seamlessly with the right context.
The Challenges of Engagement
Multi-Channel Engagement
The consumer’s behaviour now revolves around Mobile, Visual and Social priorities. Mobile first experiences have surpassed desktop. Instagram has set the bar for a highly engaging visual experience. Many experiences that don’t meet the same standards, fall short from the consumer’s perspective and do not win their attention. Social Media has taken 20% of all our time on the internet. Brands now compete with Social Media for consumers’ time. To meet the consumers’ new higher expectations and win their attention, brands must stand out by providing the most contextualized, personalized and relevant engagement they can, and the answer to this is conversation.
Lack of Curated Engagement Content
Information overload is plaguing consumers as content is coming at them from countless channels. Much of the information consumers are bogged down with is often of limited value. Of course, providing large amounts of content to consumers is required for a brand to succeed. In fact, more content can be beneficial to your SEO and have other positive impacts on your brand. But the content that is shared with consumers can only be impactful if it’s done right. The more personalized the content, the higher the perception of quality from your customers. Equally important is your way of engaging with your customers. Personalized, conversation based engagement will provide your customers with the highest quality experience and will allow your brand to stand out from the rest of the limited-value content coming their way. Conversation based engagement not only allows for deeper personalization of content, it also allows you to engage with your customers at the right moment depending on their behaviours and needs. This is the new Contextual Marketing paradigm (the 3R), it’s about providing the Right Offer to the Right Person at the Right Time.
Inefficient Engagement Processes
Consumers are at the end of a broken process where content is being shared via outdated tools and incomplete integrations. As a brand, you often want to share the same content across multiple channels and give your audience a unified experience. Inefficient content processes create a negative experience for the consumer and are part of the reason there is so much limited-value content coming at your consumers from all directions. Inefficient processes are also the root of a brand’s wasted resources as they are trying to communicate through multiple channels without a streamlined tool. Hence, there’s a need for an integrated set of technologies that are required to overcome these inefficient processes.
