Strengthen Your Relevancy as a CMO and Marketer – Part II: Shifting focus from ‘share of voice’ to ‘share of journey

Last week, our Senior Consultant, Phillip Jein, wrote a short guide on how to (re)define your role in the organization by better aligning your role, responsibilities and performance measures. This time, Phillip zooms in on why you should shift your mindset from focusing on ‘share of voice’ to aiming for ‘share of journey’.

The companies that will emerge strongest from this crisis are those that:

It has never been more vital to understand your customers, so for marketers it’s time to: “Get in the game – or get benched”.

Survival of the fastest

In recent years, buying behaviour and habits have changed faster than most companies have been able to reorganize their technology, skills or go-to-market strategy.

This Covid-19 crisis has seen years of innovation and shifts in customer behaviour compressed into a matter of weeks. Your customers are experiencing new ways of interacting with brands in virtually every aspect, and what was previously cutting-edge has become the new normal.

Due to the fact that customer experiences seep over from one industry to the next (so called ‘liquid expectations’) you can expect the gap between what customers expect and you deliver to widen if you’re not proactively responding to evolving demands.

Assuming things will return to what they were, is naive at best – destructive for your business at worst. You’ll need both speed and determination while pivoting to new ways of doing business. It’s a survival of the fastest!

Do you talk the talk – or walk the talk?

As CMO or marketer it’s your job to stay ahead of the curve; identify the shifts in technology, culture and customer expectations, and bring the rest of the organization up to speed on why these new realities matter.

Even before the current crisis we were caught in a paradox. On the one hand, we’ve been talking about customer centricity for ages. On the other hand, brand trust is down, ad blockers have reached record-high levels and  creative effectiveness and efficiency is declining.

A recent large-scale study from CBS highlights a widening gap between customer wants and needs and company mindset. Many are out of sync with their customers simply because they still think they sell products and services – when in reality they’re sell satisfaction of needs.

So, from the looks of it, it seems like all talk – and no walk.

So, how do you emerge as the customer champion of your company?

Going from ‘share of voice” to ‘share of journey’

I’m aware of the research showing how brand growth is determined by the ‘extra share of voice’ compared to its market share (IPA).

My point relates to a much-needed shift in mindset. In today’s overcommunicated world we’re exposed to about 4,000-10,000 ads each day [Forbes], so it’s no wonder people are turning on the adblockers. Don’t you?

Instead of focusing on ‘share of voice’ – think about how you can increase the ‘voice of the customer’ in your organization to boost your ‘share of their journey’.

How do you ignite, excite and create impact for your customers?

Put yourself in their shoes – don’t just put them first

A cardboard cut-out of your ‘typical customer’ won’t cut it anymore. You’ll need to map out your individual personas and their respective journeys – and market to their behaviour. Think about your customer’s needs before, during and after an interaction with your brand. How can you help them get from one step of your customer journey to the next?

What motivates them? What are their habits? What are they eating for breakfast? What are their future needs?

What this means for marketeers is transitioning from creating messages to owning all brand experiences. What you do now, will have drastic impact on the future of your business. So, if you are not already actively trying to understand your customer experience, or worse still it’s not even on your company agenda you need to get off the bench and get in the game.

Are you having difficulties approaching this task?

We know from our previous research, there’s a major gap in how important CMOs consider customer journey, data and insights to be, versus how ready they are to work with it. It’s often not the lack of data that’s the issue – but taking action.

In our whitepaper (both in DK/Eng) Customer Journey – From Thought to Action we highlight four well-known difficulties and three steps to align your business with your customers, and their shifting behaviours.

See you next time?

I hope you found the article relevant– and if so – I urge you to tune into the next article, where we’ll dive into how you can increase your success of getting the management and boardroom onboard by changing the conversation ‘from fluffy brand metrics to real financial impact’.