The concept of customer engagement is an ever-evolving process that affects how a business survives and thrives in the current digital climate. As a result, marketing leaders have had to reform the way they engage their customers with new creative strategies and techniques. In this article, Anand Bhatia, CMO & Head Analytics, Fino Payments Bank shares how successful marketing leaders are leveraging customer engagements to drive business growth. We’ll discuss different approaches, such as crafting personalised experiences, utilizing technology, and understanding marketing strategies and the customer’s journey with Marquis Fernandes of Quantic Connect. Edited excerpts:
Understanding the customers to the core: What is the extent?
This is at the heart of whatever we have achieved in Marketing. No marketer should even attempt anything if this understanding is missing. The key is to talk to real customers and identify their real needs. We do see instances of marketing folks just checking stuff with a few friends or going by what office colleagues “feel”. This is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately marketers have access to better tools for understanding consumers. At the core nothing beats spending time with the consumer in his/ her real environment. Beyond the conventional market visits social media listening is very insightful. Also the data generated by browsing history, app usage, transaction patterns helps tremendously. Hence it is imperative that marketers become very hands on with analytics.
How are marketing leaders driving business growth by reforming customer engagements?
Marketers do this by being the “consumer in the boardroom”. This is a very important role for a marketer to don. This brings in consumer behaviour, buying behaviour to the fore and pushes the brand to give it importance. More importantly creating a culture of listening and acting on consumer insights.
Once done the marketer has to invest in the right tools for analytics and outreach ( CDP, Martech etc).
How are we making the workforce ready to adapt with evolving martech?
In some ways B schools ( of college education in general) are equipping managers with the basics of coding, dealing with data tables and using software packages. This makes people a little more confident of managing market platforms. It really helps that market platforms are getting easier to use, require nil coding skills, have click and drag features. Critically structured training, handholding with regards customer success, managers are at hand to help adoption. In my view the CSM plays a key role in getting teams ready for evolving martech. There are newer features which get developed almost daily.
How have businesses changed their marketing strategies after pandemic?
The fundamentals of marketing are fairly unwavering. It is how to adopt to newer mediums of consumer interaction. The pandemic forced brands to get more “ digital” . It is important to understand that “digital” is largely a pipe, a way to interact. Yes it has its own grammar and structure but the fundamentals remain the same. To us at Fino COVID meant – Creating Opportunities in Virus Infected Days. And we took this opportunity to amp our digital interaction and engagement with our ecosystem. Our customers also started actively adopting to digital mediums and we ensure we were present there (Place, the 2nd P of marketing).
Your Views on challenges to market better within the budget ?
This is a challenge which has existed since the beginning of time! And it will never go away. After all everything is a trade-off. A marketer thus has to be very clear about
- Being very clear on the KPIs
- Measuring attribution
- Being able to optimize
- Accepting that marketing has to be run like a profit centre
This would help managing in given budgets!
