Ensure a Quality Customer Experience

No. 26: Don't let bad experiences run a good thing.

Stat +24%

Selling higher education is really hard. I say that because unless you’re the “best” or fall into the Ivy group, a college is a college. Of course there is some nuance on the edges, but higher education is a commodity with limited variance.

So, when Kent State University turned to Snapchat to improve applications to their school, no one was quite sure what to expect.

What they found through the use of a rather simple Augmented Reality Lens was that the technology made it easy for their target to not only engage with the campaign but achieve their ultimate goal which was applications. The campaign was an improvement in their advertising spend efficiency (as it related to student recruitment) of 24%!

Tweetle-Dee

(tweet of the week)

Full disclosure: I engaged with this Tweet with a thought of my own, which I will include below. But I chose it for this week’s “Tweetle-Dee” because it got me thinking …

Aaron Orendorff @AaronOrendorff

I’ve been in marketing for over a decade. Worked for a variety of enterprises. And I have yet to see a “persona” have a tactical or tangible impact on anything.

December 10th 2021

8 Retweets119 Likes

I jumped into the conversation when Christine asked what we should focus on instead and I responded, “Experience.” It stems from a focus of mine this past year and a short conversation I had with Jason Pynn recently.

In my experience, the idea of personas is great and does help in creating content but personas is not a marketing strategy. It’s an informative street sign.

I have been spending more and more time thinking about the experience of the brand — and that includes everything from website, podcasts, customer service, social media, content — basically anything the customer can experience is a part of marketing and no persona is going to be able to guide that strategy.

Marketing Tip of the Week

See this come to life on TikTok.

Something to Consider

Above I wrote about how a persona is not a strategy but rather a guide. And if the persona is the guide, the experience is the map.

Recently, an article from The Financial Brand wrote about the future of physical bank branches and one item on the list in particular caught my attention (because it relates to how I prefer to operate as a consumer).

The article states simply, “Integrate the Technology.”

This isn’t about creating the buzzy omnichannel experience (although that is a good goal to have) but more so about making technology available and supportive of individual consumer goals.

Businesses can’t make it hard to engage with customer service, meeting with product experts, shopping, or getting price estimates.

Let technology help in any way possible.