What is Customer Centric Marketing?
Customer-centric marketing is an approach to marketing that focuses on customers’ needs and interests. It puts the customer at the core of your business. It’s based on the fact that all customers have different preferences and behaviors. This requires moving past a one-size-fits-all approach.
Customer-centric marketing is able to outperform most other marketing approaches. Why? Because it enables you to combine a variety of rich insights on individual customers. It allows you to:
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Target the right customer with the right message, and through the right marketing channel.
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Gather a plethora of information on your customers’ buying behavior, engagement, and interests.
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Identify unique opportunities to create a product or service that would fit the needs of your most valuable customers.
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Create a positive customer experience that helps to improve customer loyalty and leads to more repeat business.
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Maximize customer lifetime value by helping your product exceed customers’ expectations.
Source: gibs.co.za
The importance of customer-centricity lies in its ability to improve a company’s profitability and ROI. Companies that use customer-centric marketing improve their marketing ROI by up to 20%. They are also 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on their customers.
Customer-centric marketing does have its share of challenges. Companies that have issues with becoming customer-centric usually struggle with:
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Sharing customer information across departments
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Changing company culture to align with customers’ needs
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Finding the right technology solutions to manage customer data
Source: marketingprofs.com
How to become customer-centric
A customer-centric company is able to predict customers’ needs. It knows which products customers need, even if they don’t know it themselves. Such a company is passionate about helping its customers. It understands what customers want and need, and creates services or products based on that understanding.
Source: gartner.com
Customer-centric companies focus on building meaningful relationships with their customers. They align their corporate culture with their customers’ needs. To be able to become customer-centric, companies need to:
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Get senior leadership onboard – To be able to shift to a customer-centric marketing approach, it’s crucial to get support from senior leadership. If those at the top believe in customer-centricity, employees will have an easier time adopting a customer-centric approach as well.
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Build a customer-centric infrastructure – Personalized experiences are key to customer-centricity. The only way to scale these types of experiences is to build a customer-centric infrastructure. This infrastructure should be based on systems and workflows designed to provide the customer with as much value as possible.
We’ve defined customer-centric marketing and discussed all the benefits and challenges that come along with it. We’ve also talked about what it takes to become customer-centric. Now we’ll take a look at specific customer-centric marketing strategies you can implement to become customer-centric. We’ll also mention some customer-centricity examples to help inspire you.
Gather customer feedback
Source: medium.com
Marketers can often become so obsessed with their product that they forget about what matters the most: customers and their needs. To become customer-centric, it’s crucial to try to look at your offering through the eyes of your customers and understand how they perceive it.
Instead of making assumptions about how your customers think and feel, ask them. To gain a better understanding of their needs, you can gather customer feedback by using surveys, interviews, and quizzes.
Survey customers
One of the best ways to gather customer feedback at scale, surveys allow you to learn how satisfied customers are with your product or service. They can also give you an insight into what your customers would like to see implemented or improved.
Opinion Stage’s Survey Maker gives you an easy way to create customer surveys that achieve excellent participation rates. With the Survey Maker, you can customize every aspect of your survey and make sure that it completely matches your brand’s look and feel.
Conduct customer interviews
Having a one-on-one conversation with a customer allows you to go deep and discuss every aspect of the customer’s experience in detail. Exit interviews, in particular, can provide you with very valuable information on your customers. You can then use this information to improve customer experience and avoid losing customers.
Use personality quizzes
Gaining an insight into your customers’ personalities can help you define your customer personas in more detail. It will also enable you to adapt your marketing efforts to your customers’ needs and wants.
You can use Opinion Stage’s Quiz Maker to create fun and high-performing quizzes that your customers will enjoy completing. The Quiz Maker includes a variety of pre-made quiz templates that make creating quizzes a breeze.
Educate your customers
Source: neilpatel.com
A customer-centric company focuses on helping its customers reach their goals. One of the best ways to do this is by educating customers.
To educate customers, create content that is relevant to them and that helps them solve their pain points. Here are some options you could consider:
- Publish blog posts
- Create infographics
- Write Ebooks
- Make some videos
- Start a podcast
- Host webinars
Provide a personalized experience
Source: salesforce.com
Customers don’t want to feel like they’re just a number. They want you to treat them as unique individuals. This will involve catering your approach to their specific needs. It’s crucial that you create a personalized experience for your customers. This includes personalizing the following:
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Email communication – Your email communication shouldn’t give out the impression of a regular mass email campaign. Instead, customers should feel as if you’re addressing them individually. To achieve this, you’ll need to provide them with precisely the information they need at that moment.
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Content – All the content you create should cater to your customers’ needs and be presented in a format that is the most convenient for them to consume.
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Customer support – All your customers are different and will have different issues and needs. That’s why you need to take a personalized approach to customer support. One way to do this is to use tools such as live chat software to be there for your customers any time they need your help.
Focusing on your customers and their needs will allow you to improve both customer loyalty and customer lifetime value. When looking to take a more customer-centric approach to marketing, start by gaining approval from senior leadership. Work on creating a customer-centric infrastructure. This, in turn, will allow you to create and scale personalized customer experiences. Gather feedback from your customers to learn more about their needs and wants. Educate customers to help them solve their pain points and reach their goals. Provide a personalized customer experience by personalizing email communication, content, and customer support. Is your company currently trying to take a more customer-centric approach to marketing? Have you encountered any challenges so far? Let us know in the comments.
