Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

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Marketers have a 'coin-operated' view of their customers

They're more focused on transactions than relationships

The unintended impact of this transactional view of the customer is only 11% of marketers are fully confident that their current engagement strategies will actually achieve their growth, profitability and engagement goals.

The new report, Loyalty That Lasts: Evolving Growth Strategies to Activate Emotional Connections with Brands, with research fielded in partnership with Cheetah Digital, reveals key disconnects between marketing intentions and marketing mindsets about customer loyalty and engagement:

• 43% of marketers agree that building deeper relationships with customers is their top priority in the next months.
• 3 in respondents believe the key to these deeper relationships is a more personalized approach to engagement.
• Yet only 18% of respondents are actually engaging in rich, dynamic bi-directional conversations with their customers. In fact, some 44% are spending their time just collecting voice of customer data while not responding, and another 38% admit they are either struggling to have substantive conversations or are simply engaged in a traditional one-way push communication strategy.
• In an effort to boost engagement, marketers are focused on delivering more dynamic, relevant experiences (44% of respondents), gaining a more unified view of their customer (4%) and establishing an engagement cadence that deepens relationships and secures trust (42%).
• However, fewer than one in four brand leaders intend to expand product offerings and recommendations based on direct individual customer feedback and behavior and only 19% are able to offer real-time recommendations and in the customer's preferred channel.

"What this research shows is that marketers are rightfully focused on ways to deepen their bonds with their customers, knowing that this bond can help crystallize customer behaviors and intentions while clearing a path to enriched engagement and more profitable long-term relationships," noted Liz Miller, SVP of Marketing at the CMO Council. "The only problem is that too many of these organizations are building relationships with line items and invoices, instead of the actual people behind the voice and the transaction."

Yet for those brands who have made the hard cultural shift of defining customers, and customer loyalty, as a deeper, more lasting and unwavering attachment to the brand that is not predicated on savings, rewards or promotions, the reward has been a more receptive and open dialogue between buyer and brand based on emotional loyalty.

According to Cheetah Digital, "emotional loyalty is the deep connection achieved when every action, input and communication a customer receives from a brand makes them feel valued and respected." It is a relationship rooted in trust, purpose-built to foster affinity and attachment.

Some 15% of total respondents indicate that their organizations define customer loyalty as this depth of bond. For this group, the top attribute describing their customers include being open to recommendations (52%), digital (48%), busy (44%) and loyal (40%) as compared to those who define loyalty as a length of time of consistent transaction and purchase that define their customers as transactional (43%), demanding (40%), digital (40%) and busy (37%).

While only 11% of all respondents were supremely confident in their current strategies, these organizations with a more evolved view of the customer as emotionally connected loyalists, only 8% express any doubt in their ability to reach all of their profitability and growth goals.

"This isn't a matter of launching a new program or delivering a creative campaign. What emotional loyalty demands is a shift in how we think, respect, and embrace the customer," noted Judd Marcello, EVP of Global Marketing at Cheetah Digital. "Creating lasting relationships with busy, tech-savvy consumers can be challenging for even the most experienced marketers. But, delivering experiences that develop affinity, attachment, and trust between your brand and its customers - creating true emotional loyalty - will soon not be a choice but the expectation our customers have of us."

The report has been made available for download at: https://cmocouncil.org

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)