A Guide to Customer-Centric Marketing

When it comes to your business, customer centricity is key. This means taking the time to understand and appreciate your customers’ needs and then meeting those needs in a way that benefits you as an individual business. Doing this will create a better relationship with your customers, making them more likely to recommend your business to others.

This is the key philosophy that drives the company and has helped them become a global leader in customer-centricity. This has led to them becoming one of the most customer-focused companies in the world.

Today, in this guide we will learn about customer centric marketing and how you can leverage it for your business.

So without any further ado, let’s get started.

What is customer-centric marketing?

Customer centric marketing aims to prioritize customers’ needs and interests. It occurs while making promoting, selling, and advertising decisions. The emphasis is on understanding why your customers need your company’s products or services so that you can deliver tremendous value to improve some aspect of their work or personal life.

Before executing a strategy, consumer-centric marketing carefully evaluates its positive and negative effects on customers. It is a way of conducting business. This is done to improve customer loyalty, satisfaction, and referrals.

You need to ask yourself a few questions before creating a customer-centric strategy.

• Will it be beneficial to my clients?
• Would my consumers like it?
• Does this benefit my customers?
• What would my consumers think about it?
• What problems are my buyers having right now?
• What do my customers want and need?

What makes customer-centric marketing important?

Putting customers first will allow you to create better relationships with your audience. It will also allow you to earn their loyalty and create a lasting business. Customers like to feel like they are part of something bigger than the product itself.

Customer centric marketing lets customers tell you what they want from your next product or service. These useful consumer insights will support your business to grow. And They’ll feel like they belong to the brand community.

Statistics indicate that loyal customers spend 67 % more on a brand than other customers. However, selling products to them is much more comfortable because they trust your brand.

Having a loyal customer base takes much less time, money, and work to get customers to buy. Loyal customers don’t demand as much convincing. Instead, they can hop right back into the sales funnel.

Also, loyal customers are more likely to form user-generated content for you. When consumers are happy with a brand or a purchase, they like to tell their friends and family about it. Happy customers will share your content or experience on social media for their entire network to see. It quickly boosts awareness of your brand and brings in more customers. 

In reality, 82% of Americans ask friends and family for recommendations before buying. So, if you use a customer-centric marketing strategy and your customers start sharing your content, you can anticipate more traffic, leads, and sales.

How To Create a Strong Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

Preparing a customer-centric marketing strategy for the first time can be daunting, so have a look at the points mentioned below to get started:

1. Get Leadership Involved

To ensure the success of any new strategy, it’s essential to get the support and zeal of senior leadership. If senior leaders prioritize customers in every medium and interaction, it will inspire others in the organization to do the same. Regularly scheduled meetings can get leadership on board to enlighten others on customer-centric marketing, discuss forthcoming campaigns, and brainstorm innovative ways to promote the brand.

2. Know About Your Customers

Acquire a better understanding of your customers by doing some of the following:

• Conduct surveys questioning customers about the quality of the service/product, the company’s vital points, where it can improve, and how they must interact with the brand.
• Have one-on-one interviews with existing and former customers, asking about their experience with the company, why they decided to remain loyal, or why they left. You can also ask former customers what modifications would have made them stay.
• Use data from analytics tools to track customer behaviour.
• Monitor social media and/or allow Google Alerts so that you can see what people are saying about your business online. For instance, if customers usually complain about how hard it is to navigate your website, that could be a sign to revamp the site. You can also see which type of content your customers like to see on social media.
• Read customer emails and observe calls to see how customers interact with your company.

3. Add Value to Every Customer Interaction

Customers, or potential consumers, can be at any stage of their journey with your company, therefore it’s important to create appeal at every touchpoint. Whether they interact with your organization via social media,  contact you regarding an issue, or are at the last phase of buying a product/service, every part of the buyer’s cycle should spark attention and joy.

With custom communication solution enterprises can create their own branded messenger in 2 weeks, with the company’s logo, name, colors This way users can interact directly on a business app, more dynamically and using a user-friendly platform. Allow business communication to expand with collaborations and engagements through messaging, audio and video calls, group chats, file sharing and more.

 

To communicate with you, customers are becoming immune to traditional messaging and want to interact with your business when they want, where they want. In today’s business communication, you can realistically fulfill all your communication needs via your own business/company messenger app. Another great solution is to work with business phone providers and implement a phone system to keep your business communications more professional.

 

4. Build infrastructure around the customer

Investing in customer-centric infrastructure will give you higher ROI. Systems and workflows are the most useful way to scale personalized experiences.

For instance, connecting customers to the most relevant resources needs targeted messaging built around customer segmentation. Optimized strategy can create flows for every type of customer demand or job-to-be-done.

Customer-centric marketing has to be hyper-personalized to be useful. Understanding your user personas is a great start, but customers must be segmented in your systems to speak to each person.

There are an unlimited number of ways you can segment your user base. From the services they operate, how active they are, to their job titles — the more granular you can be about your customer base, the more precise you can be with your marketing strategy.

Rather than building tools designed to achieve business goals (e.g., getting customers to sign up), design tools to accomplish customer goals, and the business’s success will flow from that.

5 Ways to Implement a Customer-Centric Strategy

To become more customer-centric, be aware that it takes time. You’ll need to cultivate new skills and technologies while getting buy-in from the executive team. Once you have those three requirements, you’ll still need some time to iron out the finer points of your strategy.

However, a few quick tips will assist you in getting started faster. Take a look:

• Keep things straightforward – You know much about your brand and are likely to share your product’s or service’s USPs. But instead of pouring customers with information, narrow your outreach’s focus based on what you target audience values. It will allow you to only invest in the most appropriate messaging for your audience – not for whoever is active on that channel.

• Ensure you have high-quality data available – Marketing teams require media data, identity data, and conversion data on-hand to comprehend better who customers are, where they’re active, and what causes them to purchase.
  
• Employ brand measurement – Your preferred marketing analytics solution should let you analyze how certain touchpoints impact the perception of your brand. Without this information, you’re missing critical insight into top-of-funnel activities.
  
  
• Pay attention to the right metrics – Combining brand and performance metrics will guide how customer-centric campaigns affect your entire digital marketing funnel. For example, brand metrics contain brand recall, sentiment, and net promoter score. Then, consider performance metrics like churn rate, funnel velocity and return on marketing investment.
  
  
• Don’t just consider the customer-centric approach – Going all-in on a single perspective can be detrimental, especially in today’s explosive marketing environment. For instance, if you have limited data on a new audience, you can utilize a channel-focused approach until you have sufficient data to comprehend their needs fully. Because of this, ensure you have access to a flexible marketing analytics solution.

Customer-Centric Marketing Examples

Many companies have taken a customer-centric strategy to their marketing strategy and have gained great success. These companies have:

1. Starbucks

One of the most well-known successful customer-centric marketing strategies examples is Starbucks. Starbucks initiated a reward-based Loyalty Program. This program offers various perks, including exclusive discounts, free refills on brewed coffee, and free drinks for consumers on their birthdays. However, one of the program’s standout services is letting customers order and pay before arriving at the restaurant.

This means customers who are pressed for time can schedule their items for pickup, thus bypassing long lines and inconsistent wait times.

According to Forbes, Starbucks attributed 40% of its sales in 2019 to its rewards program. Forbes also said that users of the Loyalty Program’s app were 5.6 times more likely to visit a Starbucks every day.

2. Bacardi

In 2019, Bacardi liked to get potential customers in the UK and Germany thrilled about the brand’s new single-malt whiskies. Understanding drinkers in that demographic usually have a taste for luxury, Bacardi teamed up with Amazon to create a live whisky tasting that customers can enjoy from the convenience of their homes.

The spirits company formed its Single Malt Discovery Collection, made up of three whiskies exclusively for tasting. Customers in the UK and Germany could buy the collection from Amazon and, in turn, obtain access to the live-streamed tasting. Customers could ask the host questions via a custom landing page on Amazon during the live stream. Over 500 questions were asked, and Bacardi saw an upsurge in sales on Amazon.

3. Nordstrom

Luxury department store chain Nordstrom aimed to improve its service and product discovery by making a more streamlined and personalized shopping experience. The company accomplished this by executing its Nordstrom Analytical Platform. The platform comprises AI models that manage inventory control and fulfillment tasks and route orders to the nearest store.

The company also made fashion maps in which the AI utilizes natural language conversations, images, and social media information to anticipate customer preferences. Thanks to AI, the Nordstrom Analytical Platform delivers personalized products and selections for consumers via its Looks feature, storyboards, and more.

Conclusion

Customer centricity is the key to success for any business. By focusing on the needs and wants of your customers, you can create a loyal customer base that continues to recommend your products and services.

Customer-centric marketing is a great way to increase customer loyalty and engagement. Focusing on the customers most important to your business can create a more engaged and satisfied customer base.

If you also want to build a loyal customer base for your business, make sure you launch a referral program that will give a boost to brand loyalty and bring great ROI. 

Invitereferrals , is a great referral program software that helps businesses like yours to launch an engaging referral program that is too cost-effectively.