Refocusing your brand around experience-led growth

As the digital economy has grown to become the economy — and countless digital storefronts have popped up to capture consumer spending — customer experience has become the major differentiator enabling top brands to rise above their peers. Since any brand can place items in an online store, today’s consumers are faced with a dizzying array of options, and naturally gravitate towards brands that consistently deliver excellent customer experiences. Whether these experiences are fully digital or enabled by digital along the way, they now demand broader content and deeper personalization, while spanning more languages, geographies, and audience segments than ever before.

For brands, the modern business challenge is meeting this rising demand for new experiences in ways that thrill consumers yet also drive sustained profitability, keeping the C-suite smiling. At a time when every business is feeling pressure to do more with less, the key to sustained profitability is experience-led growth.

Experience-led growth means that both the brand and its customers derive continuing value from the entire experience journey — the result of personalization and harmonization, accomplished when all a customer’s points of brand engagement feel like one consistent experience. Achieving this requires a strategy where the customer is the center of not only marketing, but all of a brand’s channels and modes of engagement. Using deeply integrated experience technologies and properly governed data, experience-led growth creates a multi-dimensional, real-time view of each customer as an individual, then ensures brands deliver the most relevant experience possible at each step of their journey.

This may sound tricky, or perhaps even daunting during economically uncertain periods, but creating a unified, personalized experience will improve customer acquisition, engagement, conversion, and retention, all while lowering costs and increasing productivity across the entire funnel. By leveraging advanced artificial intelligence to make sense of unprecedented quantities of data, brands of all sizes will be able to deliver more human, individualized customer experiences. Regardless of economic conditions, customer experience is always a north star — the factor that fuels business growth in boom times and loyalty in lean ones.

Refocusing your business for experience-led growth

The most critical and challenging element of attaining experience-led growth is aligning and connecting key customer experience elements across channels and modes of engagement. Siloed operations are impediments to experience-led growth, so businesses must closely integrate disconnected teams and applications with a central platform, then unify their data in a way that can be actioned in real time.

Top brands have discovered that their ability to deliver relevant, personalized experiences increases dramatically when they connect their marketing, product engagement, on-site experiences, sales, and customer service teams to deliver unified customer experiences. Tangible results include more complete and valuable customer engagements, followed by higher initial conversion rates, order values, and ultimately loyalty.

To optimize customer experiences across the funnel and deliver more value, businesses must refocus their resources on these three major areas:

1. Placing more emphasis on digital channels, to attract and engage customers where they are today. Brands will find that customer experiences with each touchpoint become more relevant as context is revealed and reflected across channels. Moreover, customer experiences that are appropriately personalized, contextually relevant across channels, and respectful of privacy preferences make customers feel seen and respected, increasing trust in your brand.

2. Delivering personalized experiences at scale across digital channels — including marketing and product experiences. One goal of experience-led growth is a seamless, singular customer experience with your brand, so customers can avoid relearning the rules of engagement when engaging with each individual channel. Regardless of whether a customer is buying for themselves or a company, decision-makers should always be understood as individuals with personal preferences, and treated as such. To approach customers as people, the next generation of customer experiences will be both omni-channel and personalized, so each customer can pick up right where they left off, anywhere and however they are engaging with your brand. This shortens the brand’s time to value, and increases customer loyalty.

3. Increasing internal agility and efficiency across the business through self-serve capabilities. Most businesses are siloed both in organizational structure and by tools — collaboration and insights may be limited by teams and ability to use specific applications. To thrive in the digital economy, refocus your company’s attention on the comprehensiveness and coordination of your content supply chain — the combination of interconnected solutions that connect multiple teams with a unified view of content plans and progress while enabling each team to use its preferred tools at each stage of development. Going forward, generative AI will supercharge your content supply chain by automating everything from variation development to customer journey planning, multiplying content output while decreasing wasted human effort.

Building your brand’s foundation for experience-led growth

At Adobe, we know that experience-led growth is not a spontaneous process — it is the product of deliberate and thoughtful reengineering of some foundational business elements, with trusted customer experience management technology at the core. One foundational bedrock of experience-led growth is a unified data platform that serves as a single source of truth for multiple teams, synthesizing new data into customer profiles in real time, while also providing robust data management and governance functionality. As regulations and customer privacy considerations evolve, this platform will enable your brand to continually stay both compliant and contextually informed while delivering personalization at scale.

Another bedrock will support your development of a robust and efficient content supply chain — the comprehensive, end-to-end process your brand needs to support personalized experiences at scale with vast and diverse creative content. A new survey of global marketing and CX leaders found that 88 percent say demand for content increased by at least 2x over the past two years, with about two-thirds saying they expect demand to grow by more than 5x in the next two years. The foundational technology brands will need to effectively to meet this demand is a platform with an extensive collection of natively connected applications for omni-channel experience deployment — covering everything from development and orchestration to delivery and measurement. Critically, to achieve seamlessness across touchpoints, this platform must support continuous real-time personalization of experiences across marketing, in-product, in-person, and customer service.

Working together, platforms that have been thoughtfully unified for internal collaboration and external delivery of customer experiences make experience-led growth possible. They provide the efficiency necessary to manage productivity and cost across the content lifecycle, removing unnecessary roadblocks while improving cross-functional resource allocation. Properly equipped brands will be able to do more with less and deliver superior experiences, then smoothly scale upwards to meet growing demand.

Refocusing your brand to facilitate experience-led growth is a process, not a product, requiring both technologies and the resolve to implement them. But once that process is underway, every investment in customer experience will deliver value, enabling your brand to enjoy the sustained, profitable growth that enables continuous success in the digital economy.