Why Customer Experience Is an Essential Trait of Good Thought Leadership

Did you know that enterprises with a customer experience mindset drive revenue up to 8% higher than other companies in their industries? Marketing departments can no longer ignore customer experience (CX).

Those are the thoughts of Jason VandeBoom, founder and CEO of customer experience automation platform ActiveCampaign, in a recent guest piece for Digiday.

Jason writes eloquently about how CX is becoming more accessible, designable, and creative. And how it's impossible to ignore its importance in marketing right now.

He says:

"Experiences are what people buy, what people remember, and what people talk about. They are fundamental to the product and the way it is promoted. They build brands."

Our team couldn't agree more with all of this.

CX leads to higher customer lifetime value, reduced churn, reduced marketing costs, better brand equity, and so on.

But we'll take things further and state that understanding CX is an essential trait of good thought leadership. We'll explain how and why below.

How Understanding CX Makes for Great Thought Leadership

Good customer experiences are about meeting customer expectations and making customers feel incredible as you move them through your sales and marketing funnels. Good customer experiences also make customers the top priority in your company — VIPs or MVPs you treat with dignity and respect.

Delivering good customer experiences involves tried-and-tested systems to collect and measure that feedback — and combining it with your expertise to turn it into actionable insights. You can then use your decision-making skills to enhance or improve a customer's experience.

All of that leads to - in essence - the same path to excellent thought leadership.

We understand the concept of CX and why you should use it as the foundation of your thought leadership marketing strategy. We also realise that anyone, including you, can become an expert in your niche or industry by understanding your customer and optimising their journey. Using the foundations of CX can help you communicate to audiences in podcasts, social media posts, blog posts, and more. You will know how your brand engages with customers at multiple touchpoints and how to generate real marketing value.

What Does This All Mean for a Marketing Manager?

Jason says no one is more likely to excel at CX than a small business owner:

"[Small business owners] have an instinctive feel for consistently delighting customers, making the experience a reason to come back and recommend to others. What has changed is that they now have the tools to design and deliver experiences like this at scale."

Marketing managers at larger firms should take note!

We think managers need to get back to basics and understand what CX means. (What it means.) It's not a marketing trend or just another buzzword. It's not a one-time thing, either. It doesn't mean patronising customers or treating them like they owe you something.

Jason cleverly dispels some old CX misconceptions too:

●     Customer experience is not a cost-cutting exercise, he says.

●     It doesn't mean using automation for personalisation. (Automation and personalisation support each other.)

●     It doesn't mean ignoring technology. (You should use tech as a "creative canvas.")

He also says:

"Many marketers talk enthusiastically about customer advocacy, but far fewer develop plans for capturing and scaling it."

We believe successful CX is a journey, a destination, and something that requires a real connection with a consumer. Notice how we used "consumer" and not "consumers" there. That's because every consumer matters. No two consumers are the same. No two customer experiences are ever identical. It would be best to communicate these principles in your thought leadership marketing.

Thinking With a Different Voice in Your Head

Being a marketing expert requires not only an insane knowledge of customer experience (and customer success, customer engagement, and customer satisfaction) but also a killer thought leadership strategy. The fundamental concept of this strategy is?

Being an expert requires sharing those thoughts that make you an expert.

You can share your observations, opinions, or thought leadership marketing strategies about CX on your blog or social media. Write reports. Write listicles. Create charticles—record videos. Go wild.

You might have a precious lesson about a customer experience you want to share with the world. (How a particular insight from a customer feedback strategy led to a massive discovery about all the customers in your organisation, for example.) Or you might passionately believe in the CX software tool you've helped develop. (For example, a new tool that automatically collects customer feedback and generates lucrative insights about consumers.)

In other words, content should be the basis for your thought leadership framework. Create lots of it. Some of it will be popular; some of it won't. But all of it has the potential to inform, educate, and inspire someone somewhere.

Content has never been as crucial as it is now. Jason mentions that 60% of consumers have seen a positive shift toward more robust customer experiences since the COVID-19 pandemic, again in his guest piece for Digiday here. He thinks marketers at larger enterprises should be ready to respond to the post-pandemic world.

We will take this point further by stating that businesses of all sizes won't survive the fallout from the pandemic if they continue to ignore CX — or, rather, dismiss a successful CX thought leadership strategy like continuous content creation in the form of blog posts, social media posts, and thought leadership videos.

Final Word

Not many companies comprehend the link between thought leadership and customer experience. However, becoming an expert in marketing requires a complete understanding of CX and everything it stands for in today's post-pandemic marketing world. Creating a thought leadership marketing plan or strategy that helps you share thoughts about CX strategies, tools, and technologies can help you dominate your niche.