You've got your marketing humming. Your advertising is on song. Your direct mail is getting good conversion rates and your newsletter looks great. But have you neglected to invest and the same effort in the most powerful brand builder and sales converter of them all - the customer experience?

The sheer level of marketing noise everywhere you look makes it incredibly difficult to cut through the clutter with your marketing. The competition for the attention of your customers is staggering. We are all subject to thousands of marketing messages a day across a myriad of marketing mediums from buses, billboards and takeaway food napkins to TV and product placement in video games. To stand out from all the noise, you have to be creatively exceptional, incredibly relevant or have great timing. Well, actually, you need to be all three.

So many messages mean that we tend to block them out. We don't pay attention and therefore never see the marketing messages that well-meaning marketers are trying to get across to us about their products and services.

Communications 101 tells us to first get the attention of your audience.

But when exactly do we pay attention? We pay attention when we actively research, buy and consume products and services. Each of these events is an experience we have with a brand. It's the one time that we are absolutely paying attention.

It's now personal, and it's make-or-break time for a brand.

Throughout this article, we refer to 'the market' as being both customers and prospects.

Why focus on the customer brand experience?

Keeping your brand promise

You've made a brand promise and you are expected to live up to it. Don't tell me you're the friendly and helpful brand and then have a call centre specialist be cold and unhelpful to me when I call. No amount of advertising will make up for this experience. Conversely, if I receive all the assistance I need from a friendly voice, I will buy into your brand position and your advertising will actually resonate with me going forward.

Customers can forgive a mistake in the delivery of products or services if you set it right. But if you break a fundamental brand promise, customers will be unforgiving as it goes to the heart of what you say your organisation stands for. And nowhere is brand felt more than at the time your customer interacts with you, particularly in service industries.

Advocacy is still incredibly important

Improving the brand experience directly influences satisfaction, commitment and advocacy - all of which are stable predictors of future business from that customer and referrals to others. An improved brand experience that adds value to a customer therefore leads to higher sales volume.

If you can deliver the brand 'WOW' factor to your market whenever they deal with you, the propensity for them to refer you on to others increases substantially. With so many options and so many suppliers to choose from today, one of the key challenges for consumers is deciding who to buy from. Many still look for independent referrals from people or sources they know and trust.

Nowhere is this more evident than in online forums and social media. It is considered the ultimate source of truth where you can ask a question of the masses and replies will be raw, unadulterated and perceived as completely trustworthy. Get it right and have people say good things about you.

Get it wrong and it goes on your company's permanent online record.

Converting sales and keeping customers

The market interacts with your brand at a number of different stages including pre-purchase, purchase and post purchase. Although the objectives of the brand experience changes at each stage, they all have significant impact on your brand and your ability to convert sales and retain customers.

*The objective may be to exceed expectations for certain situations (but you need to choose the right ones to focus your resources on)

One of the last sources of competitive advantage

Your competitive advantage often lies in the brand experience you deliver to your customers. The customer experience you deliver is not easily copied by competitors. It is a complex combination of systems, processes, culture and marketing that creates a true point of difference that is not easily replicated. So this is your chance to 'WOW' them.

How to deliver business-building brand experiences

There are so many options and approaches you can take to improving the brand experience and so many customer touch-points where experiences occur. Where do you start? These rules of play should help make the task a bit less daunting.

Rules of play

• Identify the required customer experience and work backwards from there - as with anything in life, when you know the end point, it is far easier to plan, prioritise and work towards it.

• Be authentic - be faithful and genuine to your brand promise and to yourself. Consumers appreciate your sincerity and belief in what you do and can sense a disconnect between what you say you're about and what you actually do. To be genuine, the Board, management and staff must buy into the brand promise. They must own it and believe it. When they do, every time your organisation touches the market, you can rest far more assured that the customer experience will be on brand.

• Focus on the most relevant customer touch-points - there are typically a lot of touch points with the market. It's better to really nail the important ones than to try to fix all of them at once. You need to do the research to figure out which touch points really matter and focus your efforts on these.

• Focus on delivering a benefit - deliver something the customer truly values. Find out what's most important to customers and deliver an experience that's second to none in the areas that really count. Conversely, if you deliver a great experience on something of little importance to customers, your return on investment just won't be there. For example, if customers value fast and efficient online transacting more than receiving a 'how are things going' courtesy phone call, channel your resourcing into exceeding their experience expectations on the former.

• Creativity and the 'WOW' factor - be creative and deliver the 'WOW' factor in the brand experiences you give your customers. Once you figure out which experiences you want to improve, be as creative as you would be with your advertising to create an experience that customers will literally say, 'WOW, that was great!' Call in creative expertise as you would with any other creative element in marketing. This one great experience you deliver will be remembered by your customer and talked about with their friends.

What you need to know

Knowing which experiences to improve and where to concentrate your resources comes down to your knowledge of your market and your knowledge of your competitive strengths and weaknesses. The following is what you need to know to be able to design great customer experiences that will build your brand, create a competitive advantage and improve your business performance.

• What does the market really value when making enquiries, making purchases or using services?

• What does the market think they get from you when making enquiries, making purchases or using services?

• What are the market's likes and dislikes about the experiences you deliver?

• What does the market think your brand stands for?

• What gaps are there between your brand promise and what you actually deliver in terms of experience?

• Which of these touch-points have the greatest impact on brand, satisfaction, commitment, advocacy and purchase intent?

• What experience does the market really want?

• What strengths and weaknesses do your competitors have in delivering experiences to the market?

There is a saying: 'In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King'.

Bruce Stafford