Over the last year, both consumers and B2B buyers suddenly had to make the switch to purchasing goods and products online, with many physical stores around the globe closing for long periods of time as a result of COVID-19.

With a significant increase in the need for digital customer experiences, it’s now more vital than ever for brands to offer seamless experiences online. Those who don’t are at serious risk of falling behind the competition.

While many businesses have seen significant budget cuts and are under a mounting pressure due to the uncertain economic climate, brave boards are pivoting existing strategies to focus on providing customers with more personalised and adaptive digital experiences.

By providing more tailored and relevant experiences — particularly ones that are predictive rather than reactive — brands have a real opportunity to stand out above the noisy crowd of online choices. In addition, by extending empathy and understanding, brands have the opportunity to increase both customer loyalty and brand advocacy.

Digital leaders are recognising the benefits of personalised experiences, with 93% stating that personalising content on their website has increased their company’s revenue. They also understand the need to emulate these across their own websites, with nearly a half (46%) saying they have received a better experience when a company has personalised content based on their history, behaviours and personal information.

Meeting customer expectations

Although digital leaders understand the need to personalise their online experiences, over half (71%) admitted that their existing experiences are not matching up to their customers’ expectations —highlighting a clear customer-centricity gap.

The remaining proportion of the respondents, however, are completely unaware of this gap. According to similar research, 82% of consumer-focused brands reported that they were customer centric, but with only 18% of their customers having agreed.

It’s clear that there’s an opportunity here for brands to not only strengthen relationships with their existing customers, but to attract new ones. But in order to do so, brands need to ensure new customers’ needs can be understood and met, which means being able to answer the following questions:

• Who is engaging with my content?
• What are they trying to achieve?
• How are their needs and preferences changing?

It’s also key for team to understand how they can automate relevant content experiences and build a capability in their business to expand this further. But what do digital teams need to do I order to gain access to these in-depth customer insights?

Accessing real-time customer insights

Insights-driven marketing can help to improve customer satisfaction levels, as well as enhance customer loyalty and retention. But this isn’t possible without having access to the right data.

Firstly, marketers need to have an understanding of the data they are currently using, the data they have access to, how to bring together and analyse these insights, but most importantly, how they can best use these to improve their marketing efforts.

They must also consider how they can use the more complex data sources available to their advantage — including a customer’s location, interests, professional experience and even shopping behaviour. This richer data can be used through digital experience platforms to transform these insights into a deeper understanding of customer behaviour, which is needed to successfully create more personalised and relevant customer experiences.

Digital content can be optimised and recommended to increase engagement levels and successfully convert browsing into transactions and in turn, revenue. Having access to these digital and customer insights enables marketers to start making decisions based on evidence rather than guesswork  — helping them to gain more intelligence each time a customer interacts with their content.

This can go even further to build a true digital learning organisation, where digital teams have the ability to collect and analyse data in real time to understand the best performing content on their site and what type of information people are looking for.

Marketers can use these insights to build a foundation for marketing strategies going forward, linking content efforts directly with conversions and key transactions that have a role to play in the company’s overall success.

Remaining ahead of competition through experimentation

In order to remain relevant in today’s competitive market, marketers not only need to create targeted and personalised content, but must continuously experiment with that content to ensure that it is engaging existing customers and also attracting new ones.

Those digital teams who can access these in-depth customer insights are the ones who will create the highly effective and engaging marketing campaigns needed to cut through the noise.