By M. Isi Eromosele

The proliferation of social networking and its attendant technologies has shifted the online space from a product-centric model to a customer-centric one.

As a result, a new level of transparency is now required between businesses and customers and there’s an even greater focus on the role of the brand in online business. Unfortunately, the majority of businesses continue to miss the opportunity to adequately engage with consumers online.

It isn’t that corporations aren’t there. It is simply that they don’t have a clear brand strategy for their online channels.

Online And the Customer Experience

While 78 percent of major corporations said they are using social media, only 41 percent of those surveyed said they have a strategic digital plan in place. This leaves nearly 60 percent of these companies sending mixed messages from various internal departments and outside agencies.

This makes it difficult for customers to know which story to believe. It seems that the biggest mistake brands make when it comes to the digital experience is the oversight of how important customer experience online is.

Meanwhile, some of those companies that build brands around the customer experience are modifying perceptions more effectively, driving choice, loyalty and premium prices. Staples, for example, promote and deliver on “easy shopping.” This builds on a key consumer insight that shopping for office supplies can be hard to manage.

You can find proof points of this idea throughout its customer experience, both online and off. By comparison, Staple’s competitors have not created any compelling idea around their brands and often resort to price discounting in lieu of meaningful messaging.

Other companies that deliver a phenomenal brand experience include Amazon.com and Apple. Amazon.com builds loyalty and advocacy at unprecedented rates by continually improving every touch point along an end-to-end customer experience.

Apple customers will line up down the block and pay premium prices for a chance to be part of the masterfully choreographed brand phenomenon. Do you remember ever seeing the iPhone on sale?

Mapping The Customer Journey

One of the most effective ways to craft a strong and effective branded digital experience is to create a customer journey map. This provides a framework for analyzing how customers engage with your brand, establish the most relevant touch points and quantify them through research. When comparing this journey to that of competitors, it is easy to identify white space opportunities for the brand and potential digital applications.

Once the key customer segments are established, each individual journey is examined as it exists today, as well as in an ideal state. Each segment is explored across three phases of the journey in order to gain a complete understanding of how customers engage, how they buy and how they commit.

Only by seeing the entire process that a customer goes through in choosing brands and becoming loyal to them are you able to empathize and communicate in a relevant way.

What is historically known as the “purchase funnel” has always been more complex than brand marketers realize. Historically, it’s been taken for granted that a single message fostered along a single channel will find and draw its target audience.

Today, customers take full advantage of easy access to multi-channel information online and televised, via mobile devices and social networks. This means that brands need to be where their customers are and able to learn from the signals they are sending through multiple media.

Brand Storytelling vs. Marketing

As digital communications become more and more social, companies need to look at them through varied lenses. Social media is a storytelling medium and one that will not support traditional, sales-driven messages.

Storytelling is a natural format for sharing information: it is the innate way customers communicate with each other and is a highly engaging form of messaging. In order for brand stories to spread, customers need to know the characters involved and whether or not the plot is real or fake.

As more brands jump into personal customer territory without invitation, armed only with some polished copy and a few discounts and promotions, customers are getting ever more savvy at distinguishing truth from fiction.

Social media has allowed customers to peer directly into the windows of companies and see the people who work inside. Since so many brands have opened their blinds to show what they are all about, the view inside has set lofty standards for building meaningful relationships with customers.

However, most companies still won’t allow their employees to look back out at customers. This creates a new tension in the workplace, where employees feel not only disconnected, but mistrusted by their employers.

The flip side of this presents tremendous opportunities for companies to galvanize their employees with some basic digital communication tools. Employees equipped with the proper brand voice and knowledge of how the company works will create just the right scenario to be viewed by anyone peering into the window.

Understanding Customer Conversations

There are many digital tools available for listening to and measuring the millions of customer commentaries that are created online every minute. However, if you don’t have a strategy for comprehending and reacting to the chatter, your branding effectiveness will suffer.

The strategy for understanding customer conversations begins with your brand. That is, you need to know what people are saying about you and determine how distant that is from what you say about your brand. This is particularly hard if you don’t have a clear understanding of your own messaging objectives.

This concept ties directly into the customer journey. The words customers use are just as important as their purchase behaviors. Take click-throughs or shopping cart abandonment, for example. These behaviors are telling but leave no indication of why acustomer drew nearer or left for another option.

This has bred a new method of monitoring customer behavior, called Social CRM. Unlike its traditional CRM counterpart, the social version allows the customer to have a voice in the decision-making process. Brands must do more than push a message and test response rates if they want to be competitive and win loyal customers.

Along with relationship management, Social CRM connects the people within your company to your customers. When employees link with customers, they become part of a culture of knowledge-sharing that can ultimately break down silos.

Even more so, it can dramatically increase employee engagement by fulfilling the human desire to connect with others.

Improving Customer Digital Experience

Start a digital task force within your organization. Get very familiar with your customers and employees and create a brand story that will motivate them to enter a dialogue with your customers. After all, building a group of loyal followers inside your company is the first step toward building one outside it.

Take the following steps:

Word of mouth has long been a driving force for successful brands and is even more so today. Under the new social microscope, brands need to be far more personal, honest and relevant than ever before.

Customers are in charge of the brand destiny now and are not just passive participants in the marketing process. Their journeys are happening all around you and your brand, and if you don’t look up and listen, they will pass right by you.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group