Consistency is Key: How to Ensure Your Customers Get the Same Brand Experience, Every Time

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To win in a limited B2B market, every CMO must also be “Chief Experience Officer.”

Chief marketing officers love to talk about creating and selling experiences. Yet if you ask a group of CMOs what it takes to deliver a great customer experience, there’s a good chance you’ll get several different answers.

Many will talk about improving the product deployment process or delivering better customer service, but they’re simply focusing on the post-sales customer experience. There’s not enough talk about creating a better experience from the beginning to the end of a buyer’s journey.

We often forget that every touchpoint throughout a buyer’s entire journey is an experience with your brand. This journey begins with a buyer’s existing perception of your brand even before they start researching your product on external sites, visiting your website, or interacting with sales reps.

Each touchpoint — from your web copy to email signatures to the invoice — adds to or detracts from customers’ experience with your brand and ultimately impacts their larger perception of you. You’re in trouble if their experiences don’t tell a consistent, cohesive story. This is as true in B2B as it in B2C, but fewer B2B companies spend time thinking about customer experiences as opposed to companies like Apple or Southwest that think about them every day.

As CMO, how do you find time to ensure your company is delivering a consistent brand experience at every touchpoint?

Limited B2B Markets Demand Focus on Experiences

No matter what B2B industry you’re in, it’s a naturally limited market so there’s typically a finite number of accounts that fit your target profile. For example, if you’re primarily targeting enterprises, you might be surprised to hear there are fewer than 11,000 businesses in the U.S. that employ 1,000 or more people.

And if you work in a niche industry like aerospace, the available number of buyers is even smaller. You can’t continue to repetitively cold call and email the same targets without creating a negative perception of you brand.

That’s why a focus on customer experiences, particularly in a limited market, is more important than ever. In B2B, this can often be achieved through account-based marketing (ABM), which treats a fewer number of current and prospective clients as markets unto themselves. The goal is to nurture long-term, high-value relationships with a more focused list of targets by creating more impactful experiences at every touchpoint. Because at the end of the day, experiences matter most in a limited market where customers pay attention to not only what they’re buying, but who they’re buying from.

A New Approach: Becoming the Chief Experience Officer

But what do we really mean when we say “touchpoints?” CMOs who think only of web copy and other marketing deliverables they control miss a crucial opportunity to bring the brand to life everywhere in the organization.

Let’s say you’re selling a network router to the enterprise market, and you want to be known as the market innovator who drives performance and security. What would it say if your support team took three days to respond to every request? What if your sales team approached prospects the same way as every other company in your space? And what if prospects were bombarded by pop up ads every time they visited your website? Innovation wouldn’t be the takeaway, would it?

Put differently: think about retailers with highly valued brands. Apple and McDonald’s, for example. Everything down to the package, invoice font, and store design speaks to their message: luxury tech for Apple, fun convenience for McDonald’s. Your experience should be as integrated.

And yet, as CMO, it may not be your job to write customer support scripts or sit on sales calls. What to do? Start by identifying brand champions in each department and empower them to guide the touchpoints in their department. These should be employees that are familiar with your core values and passionate about your brand. But instead of enforcing the law, allow them to give authority to others in their department on how to customize the look and feel of deliverables or have impactful conversations with customers and prospects. Be a Chief Experience Officer, and make it your mission to influence employees to bring your brand to life across the entire company.

You can’t and won’t control everything, of course. But the customer experience has to remain front and center in everything we do, even when implementing new marketing technology. Because in the fight to be considered in a limited market, you need more than just a good product. You need great, standout, consistent brand experiences at every touchpoint.

Source: B2C