Brands must meet customer demands. Unfortunately, more than half are failing even though the answer is right there.
The modern marketing landscape is flooded with buzzwords such as ‘customer-first’ and ‘experience-led’ by agencies attempting to gain a competitive edge.
But when it comes to practicing what you preach, the promises ring hollow.
84% of decision-makers believe that they meet or exceed customer expectations. But the reality differs – only 45% of customers actually agree that brands meet their needs to this point.
Truthfully, there’s a huge disconnect between the promise and how customers truly feel.
Here’s the truth behind it: modern buyers aren’t playing along. They are conducting research and making crucial decisions even before they talk to your SDRs.
What’s really causing the missteps?
It doesn’t always boil down to the execution.
When it comes to intricate marketing functions, the molecular details matter. And marketers, in a desperate attempt to meet their modern buyers halfway, cling to their traditional textbooks.
And the loop continues with marketers perceiving new problems through old definitions. Even though digital innovation has afforded marketing teams resources, most are stuck following tech trends instead of rethinking the system.
This, however, wouldn’t serve the purpose.
Modern marketers must pivot to a new playbook where the buzzwords don’t just ring hollow but can be proactively acted upon.
Revisiting and Refining Old Playbooks
The first play would be to outline a different perspective on developing customer relationships, i.e., integrating customer experience (CX) into your lead-nurturing strategies.
It’s easy to think of customer experience and nurturing as distinct functions handled by separate teams. CX is responsible for keeping clients engaged post-purchase, whereas lead nurturing is a pre-purchase tactic.
But they are really two sides of the same coin and deeply interlinked.
Lead nurturing isn’t merely about engaging leads through drip campaigns or guiding leads down the funnel. It’s an ongoing experience that influences how prospects perceive and engage with your brand.
In simple words, lead nurturing is a moment in a customer’s experience across the sales journey. And, the quality of this experience fundamentally determines whether the customer will convert and how they remember your business in the long term.
To actively turn prospects into advocates, there’s a fundamental need for continuity in the customers’ sales journey. And across the modern buying landscape, your efforts to do so would only fall flat if lead nurturing and CX were considered isolated silos.
The Customer Perspective: Rethinking Traditional Lead Nurturing
Engaging with a customer in this copy-paste market is demanding. They want to feel that they aren’t just another name in your database.
This is why savvy marketers developed personalized communications and tailored offerings.
So, why are marketers still feeling the brunt of engaging customers?
There’s a knowledge gap – customer experience isn’t only fundamental to post-sale activity. It’s synonymous with prospect experience. And this starts way before the sale has closed. Even before they purchase, the tone of your emails, follow-up gaps, and the services you suggest influence how leads perceive your brand.
So, if your nurturing communication feels mechanized or templated, you might lose the potential client.
Because customer experience is your brand’s emotional blueprint, lead nurturing is how these emotions are delivered or instilled, click by click.
Any technical drawbacks can lead to poor CX early on. It doesn’t wait to deliver a blow until a sale is closed, but silently erodes trust.
From unsubscribes to drop-offs to ‘Not Now’ clicks, leads will rarely tell you why.
But the silent answer is often a poor experience.
And even the most effective lead-nurturing efforts lead to this. Why?
1. Silos between marketing, sales, and CX.
Silos between customer-centric departments instill a fragmented journey. Each team is speaking its own language – they track distinct goals, resulting in a partial view of customers.
Additionally, communication is an integral component of businesses. It’s the driving wheel for consistent revenue flow. However, inconsistent messaging can lead to a fragmented brand experience.
Inconsistency equates to a lack of synergy between departments, which raises questions for potential buyers.
There’s a marketing team on one side making specific promises during lead nurturing, but sales start pitching a whole new set of priorities. And a CX team that doesn’t meet service-related expectations.
It makes the customers feel misled and confused, reducing trust and leaving them dissatisfied.
Similarly, siloed tech stacks can limit the view of the customers’ journey through the funnel. With limited background knowledge, CX teams have little to no space for personalizing the onboarding process.
The result is a templated experience that leaves customers displeased.
The solution?
Cross-team collaborations.
Departments must understand each other’s goals and strategies to avoid falling short or clashing in their efforts – no excessive outreach or mixed signals.
To avoid this, communication and integrated systems are imperative.
2. Misaligned messaging or irrelevant content.
Content is the single most efficient channel for effective marketing communications. With the right strategy and execution, it can afford tangible outcomes for small businesses and large enterprises.
All it requires is patience and consistency.
Consistency is the foundation for manifesting and earning brand trust.
And when it comes to content, irrelevance and inconsistency can prove detrimental. While some messaging might align with the brand guidelines, others may digress, harming the brand identity because inconsistency doesn’t reflect what the brand stands for.
Often, it relays that you’re merely following trends and don’t care for a connection; it’s all about business, resulting in misinformed promises and confusion among prospects.
The solution?
Your brand must stand by a core message highlighted through distinct content formats and channels. But the crux remains the same, and each piece is another fragment of a unified whole.
When your content reflects the same values across multiple platforms and touchpoints, it demonstrates the trust you hold in your own brand.
Uniformity is crucial to align with the overarching business objective and what the audience truly wants.
This way, the overall content delivery becomes more impactful.
3. An overreliance on automation without a human touch.
A customer’s viewpoint signifies strategically employing personalization, empathy, and contextual understanding of customer pain points.
Even with all its capabilities, machines can’t match the insights only humans can instill.
With the advent of AI and automation, marketers are heavily relying on tech, from automated emails to onboarding. There’s a crucial lack that even technology cannot fill: finesse and nuance.
Think: Your automated system sends a customer an email regarding a product update while they are waiting for a response on a support issue, making your brand appear tone-deaf and disconnected.
Without at least some human oversight, these systems can’t always track real-time behavior signals. This could result in delays when customers require an urgent response to another issue.
The simple impact: prospects feel like just another number, hampering any emotional loyalty or the possibility of building one.
The solution?
Technology would possibly replace human workers. But here’s the truth: AI and automation should enhance human efforts, not replace them.
After the monotonous and generic content churned out, the marketplace has realized the need for a human touch. Without empathy or context, customers are witness to a cold and disconnected journey.
It even alienates them at key moments, such as being stuck in a bot loop to fix a critical issue.
Savvy marketers must pivot to a hybrid model of automation for scaling and efficiency, and a human touch for high-intent moments.
For the future of the business, this model could help elevate trust and long-term value.
4. The “perception gap.”
Have you ever heard of Mazagran? There’s a good reason why not.
Starbucks and Pepsi conducted market research to understand customers’ wants. The unanimous answer to the survey was simple: They wanted a sweet, cold, and bottled coffee beverage.
As an answer, Starbucks developed Mazagran.
Source: Starbucks
The customers were polarized. Some loved it, others didn’t. And the product didn’t meet their expectations, resulting in little to no sales.
And Mazagran was deemed a failure. It now sits in the Starbucks archives as a failed experiment caused by a perception gap.
Customers have become clever with every technological innovation. They know precisely what they want from you, and it should align with what they are looking for.
But it’s complex to pinpoint what they want. This leads to a significant gap between service performance and customer expectations.
And in this current landscape, where every task is completed with a click, they want their needs addressed as quickly as possible. Any slip-ups lead to a negative customer experience.
The thread binding customers and businesses has become weak. And only a tiny portion of decision-makers are aware of it.
So, the perception gap has only widened – 91% of customers drop off due to failed expectations. This results in a tide of negative reviews, which drives potential customers away.
It’s become a market-wide conundrum.
The solution?
Marketing’s awareness of this gap has fundamentally transformed the approach to their customer-first marketing strategies.
The focus must now be on:
- Market research to fill the knowledge gap and outline customer motivations. Customer expectations matter at the end of the journey and at every touchpoint.
- Delivering on promises on time to ensure brand standards. This is only possible through departmental collaborations to help gauge priority tasks and align goals.
- An effective multichannel communications strategy that delivers. The spotlight should be on solutions that actually identify and resolve customer pain points.
- Regular surveys and feedback loops that can help marketers highlight:
- Customer expectations
- What’s promised
- What got delivered
- The impact
In short, lead nurturing shouldn’t just be a strategy your old playbooks have made mandatory. It should be considered a channel that influences customer emotions positively.
Consistent CX Across Multiple Touchpoints: The New Way
Without a customer standpoint, most lead-nurturing tactics are unidirectional and lack nuance.
The underlying logic is the predictable nature of the traditional sales funnel – the prospect moves from interest to awareness and the decision to purchase.
Meanwhile, modern customer journeys are complex to outline.
Digitization of marketing has introduced newer channels and touchpoints for the modern buyer. Customers can now switch between multiple channels, further complicating the once-linear journey.
Even intent across a buying period might change – a blog might influence a purchase decision a month after reading it, while a demo request mightn’t guarantee readiness.
The modern customer journey is a tangled web.
To simplify this chaos, lead nurturing becomes a critical touchpoint in optimizing their overall experience. It offers clarity and consistency throughout the non-linear path, mirroring the actual journey and not the imagined funnel.
This is when CX and your lead nurturing efforts sync – it’s not about the conversion but shaping how your customers feel while interacting with your brand.
