2020—The Year of Integration and True Collaboration

Are you ready for yet another post on 2020 predictions? I’m looking into my Smiling Marketress crystal ball and seeing quite a few recurring themes. Don’t worry. I’ll only address one of them in this post.

You’ve probably become somewhat familiar with variations “experiential marketing.” What this really gets to is how others experience your brand. How do prospects experience your brand and does that remain consistent once they become customers? At the moment, it seems that we're focused on the prospect’s experience. Another team (your customer care team perhaps) was probably focused on the customer experience. Marketing waters are experiencing some (much needed) ripples.

These ripples are encouraging organizations to rethink their marketing roles. Marketing and customer care need to work together (imagine that!) to provide a seamless, positive customer experience. Sales and product teams need to come together in this mix to make sure every message and interaction is consistent and on-brand.

Making this shift will require patience and teamwork. Collaboration isn’t just a word you throw around because it sounds good. It needs to become part of your organization’s culture and practice.

This shift will also require rethinking data. You now need to find data management systems (customer data management to be exact) to tie into existing marketing data sets to learn what customers are experiencing and adjust to make sure it’s positive. This layer will require you to work closely with IT and procurement.

Working together

You see, 2020 won’t be just another year. It will be a year of integration. While some of you may already have your 2020 strategy, you may want to go back and make sure that you’ve touched base with your peers and make sure your strategy and their strategy align. They have to work together to outline a story (because we’re now required to all become storytellers or at least be part of the story to some degree) you can fill in with great detail as 2020 unfolds. You need to make sure your strategies support each other. Did you catch that word?

Support.

Uplift. Help. Encourage. That’s what marketing teams should do, especially in 2020 to make sure that the experience—from beginning to end—is positive and consistent.

Brand’s role in the experience

I have to touch this because it’s in my marketing DNA…and it’s in marketing’s DNA to touch on brand. This isn’t something that only PR folks touch. Brand is your entire organization. Brand is how the outside sees your organization. And with social media and digital marketing in general, brand touches everything. You need a clearly defined brand and all sales, marketing, product, customer care, and anyone I know I’m missing needs to live this brand.

Social’s role in the experience

Lastly—social media. It has evolved so beautifully since I began working in social 13 years ago. Social media isn’t just about putting out content for the sake of having something on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and all the other new social channels now out. Social media is strategic. Hand-in-hand with PR and now the end-to-end experience, social media is your organization’s voice(s). I say voices because social needs to have a voice for prospects, customers, influencers, investors, and media. It needs to provide positive experiences for all of those areas and tell stories appropriate for those audiences.

Social media reaches beyond corporate accounts. Remember, I mentioned that everyone is the brand. Well, your employees are the brand too. I use terms like employee social, brand advocacy, social selling—all these terms are tied to social media. Organizations need to make sure they’re not forgetting about the loudest voices they have—employees.

Experiential Joy

I think of 2020 and I see joy. Joy because we’re all working together and because we’re creating joy for all of our audiences. Joy in integration. Our customers will find joy with every touch from our prospective organizations. Our teams will find joy in working together in new ways.