Key Insights
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With consumers spending more time online, we see an increase in expectations for a more personalized and seamless customer experience
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When not managed effectively, online advertising is often viewed as a negative disruption in the consumer’s overall journey. This limits engagement as well as ad performance
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Fortunately, there is a way out of this–Customer Obsession!
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A customer-obsessed business model can help the industry not only create ads that inspire shoppers but also reach them at the right time
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Such an approach will help businesses stay true to their vision while achieving online marketing goals
Everyone in the ad tech industry strives to beat the competition, focusing more on features than anything else. However, it takes more than features to win the hearts and minds of customers.
Your success rests on your complete understanding of your prospects. This is how you will be able to ensure a seamless customer journey while serving your prospects with relevant content at any given time.
In other words, you need to know how to be customer obsessed.
What Do We Mean by Customer Obsession?
Customer obsession is the very core of customer experience.
Customer-obsessed organizations are always thinking of new and unique ways to understand their clients better. Such business ventures apply their knowledge and data to produce products and services that solve their customers’ problems.
Customer-obsessed businesses will focus on adding value to the customer experience.
They collect feedback regularly and ensure that client needs are a priority in every business goal. They’re more concerned with retaining and delighting existing customers than acquiring new ones.
The goal is to increase customer loyalty, leading them to become more reliant on your brand. Your customers may believe that your company is looking out for their best interests, which boosts their chances of making repeat purchases.
Why is Customer Obsession So Important?
More than anything, customer obsession refers to a type of mindset or business model that focuses on prioritizing customer needs above everything else. Amazon and Alibaba are great examples of this type of approach.
In Amazon, for instance, customer obsession is not a responsibility that falls on any single team, such as customer service. It falls on every team. Every department needs to be customer obsessed. And that ripple effect starts from the top down.
Customer obsessed businesses:
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Prioritize retention over acquisition
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Focus on quality over quantity
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Align every department with customer success
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Analyze customer data frequently
What are the Strategies for Becoming Customer-obsessed in Adtech?
Customer obsession has never been as vital as it is now for AdTech. The industry is in a resurgence. Despite languishing in investors’ bad graces over the past few years, AdTech has suddenly shot up.
Luma’s Q2 2021 Market Report shows how AdTech deals have drastically increased year on year by more than 500%.
Notable examples include Mediaocean’s acquisition of Flashtalking for a reported $500 million and AdTheorent Inc. combining with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to go public with a $1 billion-plus valuation.
When it comes to value, the answer is simple: Programmatic advertising or ad tech works. Publishers are in a much better position to incur additional revenue now than what they generated in the pre-programmatic era.
As the industry prepares for the future, key players must shift their focus on becoming a customer-obsessed brand and how this facet will go a long way in improving customer experience.
After all, the ad tech industry is expected to grow tremendously. The backbone of the internet advertising industry is set to grow from $438bn in 2021 to $1 trillion in 2030, as per the forecasts by Global Data.
Let’s explore a few strategies that will help you establish a mindset that is customer-obsessed:
1. Role of Data
Data should be your key pillar behind effective online marketing to provide a seamless customer experience.
With better technology available to assist us in accessing big data, the market is growing at an astronomical rate, reaching a value of $103 billion by 2027 (Statista report).
Real-time insights from this data will help businesses to create meaningful ads.
Start with combining location data with business, consumer, and contextual information to ensure that relevant ad content reaches the right audience at the right time.
2. Focus on Content
Content is equally important.
Marketers must have the ability to determine which ad is the right ad to show to a specific user without overexposing the consumer to their ads.
Predictive bidding, which leverages the power of data, can be of tremendous advantage.
This type of approach develops and implements algorithms to analyze the individual before the ad is displayed. This ensures consumers are being served the ad that is most relevant to them across their devices.
3. Speak Your Purpose
Improving customer experience will be incomplete without brands being true to their purpose. Your customers want to know what your business stands for and its driving mission.
Take Verizon for instance. The company’s vision is to deliver the promise of the digital world by enhancing the ability of humans, businesses, and society to do more and do better. It defines why they are here and who they are here for.
Once these are aligned, customer-obsessed companies must understand their customers’ needs — even before the customer has articulated them. Customer conversations and survey feedback can help you kickstart this process.
4. Being Multichannel
When customer obsession is the foundation of all your customer experience strategies, make use of multi-channel marketing to get the word out about your promotions.
You can utilize email to generate excitement about your promotions early among your current and most loyal customers.
Social media is another powerful tool for you to promote your offerings. This will also enable you to interact with customers and gather information on customer sentiment.
5. Keep Advancing
Technology and media are industries in constant flux.
To stay ahead of the competition, ad-tech ventures must keep abreast of the changes. And while successful startups keep up with changes, the most successful are always two steps ahead.
The key is to be nimble and innovative to turn challenges into golden opportunities. This will not be possible if companies don’t dream big. Allow your teams to contribute to the creative process.
6. Integrating AdTech and MarTech
Adtech and Martech do overlap but have primarily remained distinct from each other with a common goal—to provide better customer experiences.
Such disconnected systems add unnecessary complexities, making it hard for companies to know their customers well. Integrating AdTech and Martech can solve this challenge.
This type of integration helps advertisers by optimizing advertising investments while creating a 360-degree view of the customer. Additionally, companies can make use of Martech data to improve their ad targeting initiatives.
Looking Ahead
There has never been a better time for brands to leverage the new opportunities of digital advertising. And infusing a customer-obsessed mindset can help you take your digital ad campaigns to millions.
From how you handle customer complaints to the details that bring them joy, each step must be focused on how it might be perceived by your buyer.
Finally, a customer obsession focus will help you create a better stream of repeat customers who know they will get a quality product or service with top-notch customer service.
This is the second installment in our series on Customer Obsession where we look into the benefits of having a customer-obsessed mindset and how it will help businesses understand what’s motivating their customers.
Head over to our blog, On-Demand Delivery Services: 6 Key Steps to Customer Obsession and explore the six leading strategies that customer-obsessed companies can employ to recalibrate their model to deliver a smooth last-mile experience.
Do give it a read, if you haven’t, till now!
