How well do you really know your customers?
I speak to marketers on a daily basis who bravely struggle to engage their audiences with the right message, at the right moment, across a sea of touchpoints. Without a doubt, the single question I hear time and time again is: why do my customers behave in the ways they do? Personalisation at scale is the new marketing anthem, but understanding consumers needs to come first.
There’s an unworkable mess working against marketers
There’s an increasingly fragmented sea of touchpoints now separating consumers and brands. So many channels means it’s an ongoing struggle for marketers to meet their audiences with the right message at the right moment in the customer journey.
There are also a wealth of MarTech vendors clambouring for a space in your marketing tools stack (3,874 to be precise, according to Scott Brinker’s most recent Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic). They all promise to perform all kinds of miracles for your digital marketing strategy. Solving that exact mess, and restoring some sanity and clarity to marketing, is what steered my company, Falcon, to where we are now.
A new way to meet your customers
The value of knowing your customers is an adage as old as commerce itself, but now it’s actually possible on both the macro- and personal level.
Take a beer brand as an example, looking to connect with their consumers and engage with fans but with no real system of record to do so. A consumer of said brand (call him Joe) tweets about the product without mentioning the brand name. The marketing department of said brand discovers this mention, through a listening tool, and is then able to define a campaign segment of comprising thousands of profiles; people like Joe. Meanwhile in the same company, a social media manager or support advisor could quickly pull up a single profile card for a one-to-one chat with Joe, containing all previous interactions for context, should the need arise.
Now imagine having all that data displayed in one place, for all your customers, ready for you to access in seconds from one single customer view. This is what the product at the core of our relaunched platform can do.
Why we’ve transformed beyond social
We’ve very recently embarked on a relaunch of our own brand, from Falcon Social to Falcon.io. It has been an incredibly complex and exhausting process, so why did we do it? Quite frankly, social media has come a long way since we launched in 2010. It’s not the same game. Social is no longer a channel in itself, it’s meaningful data waiting to be tapped and leveraged across your business. Our company name, product, and vision needed to evolve to reflect that.
Our platform now helps to answer the biggest questions for brands right now: why do customers behave the way they do? And where should you target them? It enables visibility over an individual’s entire digital storyline – from conversations outside your brand’s reach, right up to direct messages to your brand’s social profile.
It’s the small moments and experiences with your brand that matter to consumers now. That’s certainly what we’ve been hearing from our customers and partners around the industry. A large-scale survey of our contacts which has further confirmed this: 90 per cent of respondents said customer experience was very important to their marketing strategy. However, 60 per cent said that delivering these experiences is either difficult or very difficult.
If we can ease this stress for the modern marketer, we will have accomplished something important at Falcon.io.
Ulrik Bo Larsen is founder and CEO of Falcon IO