In a shifting B2B customer landscape, with buyers moving 57% of the way through the customer journey before contacting sales, it is critical to understand what touchpoints are influencing the purchase decision. For B2B marketers, prioritizing the customer needs when developing a B2B marketing strategy is key. Often this discipline of elevating how to meet these customer needs falls into one of two camps: customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX).

It is important for marketing leaders to understand how customer experience and user experience must work together to align with the buyer journey and engage their ideal customers.

Understanding the Characteristic Differences: CX vs. UX

User experience (UX) is a relatively new concept in the larger marketing world. UX is a concept that has moved from being used primarily in creative departments to being considered by marketing leaders. UX is the experience that a user has while interacting with a specific product or service. This definition is applicable to websites because user experience drives the design and development decisions made by creative teams to select features and functionalities that appeal best to users and elicit a response. Often the feedback loop from users to the original creators of this online experience begins with research, a survey or a focus group.

Customer experience (CX) is broader discipline that encompasses any experience or touchpoint a customer has with a company. Part of what determines CX are the touchpoints a customer experiences along the customer journey. Marketing leaders must take a holistic approach when understanding customer experience for their organizations. By defining each customer touchpoint through all stages of the buyer journey leading up to a purchase decision, marketing leaders can establish metrics to measure the effectiveness of their customer experience and develop CX strategy to improve it over time. Through data and analytics, organizations can keep a constant measure of the success of their CX strategy.

Integrating Customer Experience & User Experience Into Your Marketing Strategy

Knowing the differences between CX and UX equips marketing leaders to integrate both disciplines into their marketing strategies to successfully engage customers and evoke purchase readiness.

Start integrating UX and CX into your marketing strategy by doing the following:

• Include CX & UX in your strategy discussions
• Identify tracking (both qualitative and quantitative) to support both CX & UX
• Use metrics to take a baseline measurement to determine success for testing
• Test, test, test effectiveness of CX & UX