5 CX Tips for Targeting New Audiences

The digital world has long known UX as a key metric of product success. More recently, we've become acquainted with its more comprehensive sister, CX, which accounts for all possible brand interactions. Providing top-quality customer experiences is key in today’s market where over 30% of consumers will switch brands after just one or two negative experiences.

That’s why it's so important to keep your CX in top shape when expanding your brand to target new audiences. Here are a few tips to keep in mind if you're thinking of taking the leap:

Do your homework.

Expanding into a new market means a different set of audience pain points, goals, and questions that need to be addressed. You’ll need to show how your brand can add value to their lives, and figuring that out means doing your research and applying gathered insights to a strategy that enhances their experience.

One way to learn about the lives and needs of your audience is by building journey maps to identify possible touchpoints to connect with your audience. This process should be robust--analyzing data from multiple research methods and sources while journey mapping is essential to understanding the full picture, with about 78% of leading marketers consider this top priority in understanding the customer decision journey. 

Read more about redpepper’s process for journey mapping here.

Speak their language.

A customer’s experience is enhanced when the product feels approachable and familiar. When we worked with Outsystems to introduce low-code development (a new product category) to developers and technology leaders, we prioritized channeling the tone and voice used by developers in conversations with each other to evoke a sense of familiarity. 

Speaking the language of your audience can also mean applying the learnings of your journey maps to position your brand in the channels that the customer already frequents. Today, this looks like omnichannel execution--with mobile accounting for over half of web traffic, designing for multi-device experiences is an opportunity to meet your audience where they are and improve the experience they’ve already chosen.

Empathize as the customer.

In applying research and insights to experience-enhancing solutions, it’s crucial to keep this notion top-of-mind: communicating with customers and being empathetic to their needs are two different things. What are the motivations, worries, and knowledge gaps of the person you want to resonate with, and how can you streamline their path to success?

The customer and the user are not always the same person--you may have a CMO making purchase decisions for a team of developers or salespeople. Different roles, even within the same industry, operate under different sets of context and pain points. At the end of the day, it’s the customer (not the user) whose experience will influence purchase decisions, so the ability to put yourself in their shoes at all touchpoints is vital.

Spark joy.

Don't underestimate the power of sparking joy in a new audience--every touchpoint from customer service to user interface is an opportunity to enhance a digital experience, and adding delight translates to adding value. The best way to add delight is to remedy the customer's problems for them.

Maybe they're craving an easy path to support that can be improved by leaning into AI and machine learning--introducing chatbots that are available at all times or natural language processing can add personalization to make the experience feel more 1:1. Take our work with Mars Puppo, for example, where we introduced natural language text message solutions to remedy the pain points of the dog food buying process with personalization.

Prototype and test.

Keep in mind that providing top-quality customer experiences is a long game. The relationship between a brand and its audience runs both ways--yes, it’s your job to find ways to add value to the lives of your customers, but it’s also your job to listen when they’re providing valuable information back to you.

Leaning into an iterative approach will allow you to learn and course-correct from the feedback you receive. There will always be ways to improve and innovate on a solution when expanding into new markets, so don’t be afraid to prototype and test. Nothing is static in the digital world, and your brand shouldn’t be either. Rather, view CX as a fluid and dynamic entity that grows, evolves, and changes with your brand. Read more about the 4 components of iterative marketing that can serve as a compass for your brand during times of change.