Customers and business leaders are sending economists mixed signals on what to expect in 2023. A recent Forrester report points to this uncertainty: Despite 64% of US adults feeling anxious about the state of the economy, analysts expect consumer spending to stay strong because of higher-than-normal savings. On balance, analysts expect customers to exercise more selective spending.
To stay competitive, marketing leaders must redouble their efforts to connect with customers and persuade them to spend. Using the right tone and communicating authentically in every interaction will be the difference between success and failure in 2023.
Marketers get one shot to land the right impression
Marketing teams have a low margin for error when it comes to communicating on behalf of the brand. According to research by Salesforce, 85% of customers expect consistent interactions across all the departments at a company they communicate with. Missing the mark in any of those interactions can have a high cost: Per a recent Zendesk report, 61% of customers would switch brands after a single bad experience.
On the other hand, when done right, consistent communication brings tangible results. In their aforementioned study, Salesforce found that brands delivering a consistent experience win more loyalty from 83% of customers. Keeping messaging aligned and on-brand across a growing number of channels, departments and contracted service providers presents a challenge for brands as they scale solutions across the entire organization.
The static brand guidelines marketers have come to rely on aren’t up to the task. They are difficult to enforce and onerous to update—especially with a more dispersed and hybrid workplace. They can also be challenging to integrate into a team’s day-to-day processes. Moreover, static tools are difficult to scale. They’re not as easy to implement across multiple channels and customer-facing teams and they don’t have the flexibility to help team members adjust for the context.
AI empowers teams to find the right tone for the moment
In late 2020, Grammarly analyzed data across 30 million users of its AI communication assistance to see how the year’s events affected written tone. Over the course of that year, users took on a less formal tone, with formality declining by 92%. This shift exemplified an important factor that businesses often forget: context matters and should shape how a message is delivered.
In addition to adjusting a message based on macro-environmental factors, communicators must also adjust their tone and delivery based on who they are communicating with. Consider HackerOne, the San Francisco–based security platform that leverages insights from ethical hackers to make the internet safer. This business model requires appealing equally well to two fundamentally different audiences: C-suite leaders and the ethical hacker community.
HackerOne chose Grammarly Business to assist its teams in this juggling act. Now, team members across multiple departments deliver content that resonates with ethical hackers and switch context on the fly to appeal to enterprise IT and business leaders. Grammarly Business helped HackerOne improve its communications across the board by 66% in metrics such as clarity, engagement and correctness. The solution also saves time in the crucial internal review process.
AI-powered tools like Grammarly Business offer teams real-time assistance when engaging with customers and creating content. For example, tone detection helps teams navigate different audiences with real-time insight and guidance on tone. Grammarly Business can detect over 50 tones to help teams context switch and create more positive and confident interactions. Going a step further, the brand tones feature allows marketing leaders to define on-brand tone profiles that can be customized for different internal teams and external audiences.
The resulting solution brings flexibility and agility to a once painfully analog process, saving time on heavy content reviews and dedicated team training. AI offers one example of how technology can enhance human interactions to enable a winning omnichannel experience.
Scalability is the watchword to win customer business and loyalty in 2023
AI-powered communication assistance is one way brands can meet evolving customer expectations with authentic communication and scalable solutions will be critical in a year when authenticity and consistency are needed to win customer business and loyalty. Marketing leaders must ensure their teams have solutions that can help them flex and adapt as conditions change.
