Madalyn Sklar

Co-Creating Experiences to Grow Your Business

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Customer experiences can make or break a business. As our world changes and technology offers newer horizons to chase, how we do business should also change. This includes how we treat our customers and the experiences they associate with our brands. This week on our chat, we invited the founder of NOW Marketing Group and a huge advocate for relationship marketing, Jessika Phillips, to talk about co-creating experiences. Here’s a summary of our chat.

Guest: Jessika Phillips
Topic: Co-creating experiences to grow your business.
Format: Eight questions directed at the guest. Everyone’s welcome to share.

Q1: What is a co-created experience?

Co-created experiences are a way to integrate web3 into the regular customer experience process that we’re all familiar with. This means using technology such as AR/VR, NTFs, and even the metaverse when designing customer experiences. Watch our guest talk about this topic to learn more about what co-creating might mean for you.

To explain this better, Jessika spoke about how we designed experiences in web1: it was all about consuming information. It was one-directional or read-only. Web2 introduced the concept of read and write—read someone’s post on social media, respond and react to that post, and even make your own post.

Web3 takes this even further. It’s about building out communities online where people can not only consume your content and interact with you as usual but also immerse themselves in your brand through modern communication channels.

This co-creating mentality motivates your audience to continue supporting you. By offering them newer ways to engage with you online, you’re encouraging them to become fans and advocates for your brand.

Q2: Why should businesses consider co-creating experiences online?

Co-created experiences are important because it’s a way of showing your audience that you care about them and what matters to them. In today’s business world, you’re competing against other brands to reinforce who cares most about your audience. The more you show you care, the more you’ll grow your audience organically.

For example, brands that invest time and effort in building such immersive experiences gain 25% more loyalty than brands that don’t put in the effort.

According to our guest, the metaverse market could soon be worth $800 billion, and it’s just starting out. It can only go upward from here, which is why now’s the best time for a brand to put in the resources to create those experiences for their customers.

We all know people like personalization in products and experiences they consume. In fact, 92% of people value customization in online avatars. Co-creating experiences like that is a good way to cater to what your customers want. Your audience may even be prepared to pay a premium for such customization.

Q3: What types of businesses benefit from co-creating experiences for customers?

Any business can find value from co-creating experiences. Good experiences are one of the key factors people consider when they’re choosing a brand to work with. If you can give them the sort of experience that they cherish, not only will they come back to you, but they’ll bring their friends, too.

As an example in the B2B market, Jessika told us about how sewer repair brand, Mr. Manhole, has created an online portal for their installers to engage with each other and be part of a community.

In the B2C market, community builders brand, CrossroadsNWOhio, has set up VR simulations so that potential customers can see what they’re building and what it’ll look like once development is over.

Even companies like Delta Airlines have co-created experiences for their employees’ training and team onboarding. Wendy’s has created Wendysverse where customers can share a virtual meal with a friend, shoot baconator hoops, and unlock coupons for their next Wendy’s trip.

Q4: Should you co-create experiences for employees?

Definitely. Great company culture starts from the inside. Think about ways to keep your teammates engaged with the brand, and then you can emulate that in the world.

As Madalyn pointed out, co-created experiences for employees also help the team bond with each other. It fosters a community of friendship, collaboration, and cooperation between staff.

Q5: When is the best time to start co-creating experiences?

Today is always the best time to start something that you know will benefit your business.

As Julia from NOW Marketing Group pointed out, it doesn’t take too long to get started—you can co-create experiences any day.

Q6: How do you get started with co-creating an experience?

As the word suggests, to co-create experiences, you need to collaborate with others in your network.

Start by getting involved in online spaces, whether it’s by networking with people who trade NFTs or joining in others’ metaverse experiences—show up and engage with people where they are. Then think about ways to bring your brand’s real-world experiences and products onto the online world. How you do this will differ based on your brand and what you offer, but virtual goods, VIP treatment, and gamification of activities are all ways to enhance someone’s online experience.

As our friends from Moxie Marketing Agency suggested, you can also have periodic meetings with employees and frequent customers to understand what they want in terms of an online experience.

Q7: How can you measure the ROI of a co-created experience?

Engagement is the most important metric when you’re measuring the ROI of anything. Co-created experiences are the same. Are people recognizing your brand (awareness), do they respond to and interact with you (engagement), are they sticking around for longer (low churn), and what kind of emotions do they exhibit (sentiment) about your brand? Ask all these questions when measuring the ROI of your co-created experiences.

As our guest explained, when looking at ROI, it’s also crucial to understand the type of sales you’re generating from your co-created experiences. For example, if you have an engaged audience that continues to do business with you and support you, that’s a sign that there’s real depth in the value you create. On the other hand, if you find that a lot of your customers buy once and don’t really explore other offerings you have, it’s a sign that you’re going too broad, and not deep enough. Understanding this distinction will help you hone your strategy to focus on your long-term goals.

Q8: Name some businesses that have done a good job of co-creating experiences.

Jessika’s vote went to Sugarwish, Agorapulse, Lego, and IKEA for exceptionally co-creating experiences with customers and employees.

And of course, there’s Madalyn and #TwitterSmarter. Our weekly Twitter chat is a good example of a co-created experience that involves people from multiple walks of life, focusing on providing each person with uniquely valuable experiences and relationships.

Our guest also gave a shout-out to her team at NOW Marketing Group, and the incredible work they did in putting together their Social Media Marketing conference.

Well folks, that’s all from me this week. Thanks for reading through and for more great insights from our chat with Jessika, have a look at this Twitter Moment that Joana put together for us. If you think this summary is pretty good, you’ll love the real-time chat. Join us next Thursday at 1 pm ET for #TwitterSmarter. We also hang out on Twitter Spaces at 5 pm ET to continue our chat. Catch you there!

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About me, Narmadhaa:

I write all the things—marketing stuff to pay the bills; haiku and short stories so I feel wholesome. A social media enthusiast, I hang out with the #TwitterSmarter chat crew, and am always happy to take on writing gigs.

Say hello: The Opinionated Copywriter | LinkedIn | Twitter

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