Recently, ROIALTY participated as technology partner at the CMO Digital Leaders Summit EU (friends used to call it #CMODigitalEU), which took place in The Hague, Netherlands.

The event gathered dozens of renowned C-level marketing and digital executives of some of the biggest companies worldwide from diverse sectors, such as automotive, banking, insurance, fashion, retail, and internet.
Altogether, there were 30 of the most innovative companies offering solutions and services for digital marketing: adtech, analytics, platforms and even digital creative agencies presenting their new, groundbreaking ideas. ROIALTY was the sole technology partner – you can imagine how honored and motivated we were!

During the summit, participants had very full days: workshops, roundtables, one-to-one meetings and informal meetings filled the agenda.
Each meeting provided a great opportunity both for CMOs and solution providers to get updated on the current state of the art of digital marketing strategies, best practices and newest technology; not to mention the insightful discussions about what comes next!
In this post, we would like to share with you some of the topics covered at the summit.

Even though the discussions and presentations were extremely varied, a big trend emerged from them all: customer centricity. We know this mantra has been used for a long time now, but attaining it has never been so easy: analytics, data management platforms and marketing automation tools are CMO’s best allies in this strategy. Let’s look a bit more closely…

First of all, each touchpoint and interaction with leads and customers should be designed to answer this question: “what would Mr./Ms. X like me to provide? What matters to him/her?”. Please notice that the question is not mentioning customers as an unidentified group: it is, instead, focusing on each specific person. In fact, one of the most effective characteristics of a customer-centric approach is customization. Of course, we at ROIALTY are very fond of this and our workshop “Something you should know about Lisa” focused on how companies can get more trust, satisfaction and loyalty if they customize their offerings and communications according to the specific interests and habits of each customer. Since a happy and loyal customer receiving tailored offerings will produce higher cross-selling and up-selling rates, you can see this is a win-win strategy: happy customers lead to happy marketers!

Omni-channel is another way of making your customers feel like they are at the center of the brand’s attention. There are two interesting perspectives here: provide the same high-quality service across all channels and translate the online data and experience into the physical store.
Customers expect to find consistent information among the diverse communication channels, but this is not enough: the stream of information between the brand and the customer has to continue seamlessly even if the latter changes channel! Imagine buying a ticket online, but then, once at the venue, you can’t change your reservation because the ticket office just manages printed tickets… Are you serious?!
You can provide any kind of justification, but be sure that none of them will be customer-centric AND that your customer will remember it.
B2B is also going customer-centric, and if you are wondering why it is better for you to start catching up, consider this: buyers are also customers in their “real life” and many of them are questioning why corporate buying should be more complex and intricate than retail.

Moreover, “millenials”
[Hey, wait! We hate this label, even though it can be useful for brevity’s sake. But please remember that “millenials” are all different one from another – and they want to be treated as unique, exactly because they grew up surrounded by the technologies enabling customer centricity and customization!]

…”millenials” are already in their employable ages, and you can bet that a great many of them are buyers. That’s why companies are updating their CRMs, tools and marketing strategies in order to give them a B2C taste.

A brand is customer-centric when it really listens to its customers and cares about what they are saying. Therefore, if someone has a complaint, make sure you figure out what happened and resolve it. Be smart: don’t reduce it to a “the customer is always right” matter. Rather, consider that if a customer uses some of her time to say something about you, this is likely to be extremely relevant to her. This is the field of social listening and social customer care. An inspiring workshop focused expressly on managing negativity on social networks revealed that some companies have saved millions of dollars after they investigated complaints on the social networks and discovered a major defect in their products. “A forewarned brand is a forearmed brand”.

Finally, privacy was always present in the discussions and this was not a surprise. What is notable is that the issue was not data protection per se, instead, the discussion of privacy took the customer-centricity path, too: since data is fundamental to customize interactions, customer experiences and customer journeys, brands must convince customers to allow them to access their data, but how? People at #CMODigitalEU are in agreement that this is a trust issue: brands have to build trust. Lifetime value doesn’t cope well with “one-offs”, they need to build meaningful, long-lasting, trusted, mutual, relationships with the market. In practice, brands should use data to provide value added experiences for customers in addition to being transparent on how they manipulate it.