Adapting a Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

Pretty sure you’ve heard of the traditional marketing strategies—the four P’s as they call it: promotion, product, price, and place. This can be applied to e-Commerce sites and blog sites, too. When we focus on the conversion, the times the cart was abandoned, and so on, these are essentially the four P’s at work online. We spend not just our time but our money to make sure that we get more people into the funnel, because of course, that would mean an increase in conversion.

But have you thought about who you’re catering to? What do they want from your site? What makes you relevant? Customer surveys help get the job done, and we suggest that you consider this as part of your marketing plan.

We are seeing a move from the traditional four P’s to the big C of business. The customers, their attention, and their opinions matter now. There are a lot of industries booming in all fields now and the only way to be relevant and to compete is to be able to build and nurture a strong relationship with your audience.

Adapting a customer-centric marketing strategy has never been this important. But how exactly can you do this?

CUSTOMER-FOCUSED MARKETING STRATEGY

A customer-focused marketing strategy means being able to craft plans to improve customer experience. In a book by Michael Henshaw and Bruce Kasanoff entitled Smart Customers, Stupid Companies, they say that the customer experience can be broken down in three ways: the static, the human, and the digital. Static experiences are the various ways your customers have encountered and have benefited from your product or content. Human experiences are customer interactions with your company via phone, chat, or face-to-face conversations. Lastly, digital experiences are the customers’ involvement with various digital platforms like Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, or your website.

Ensuring that customer experience remains satisfactory in all three categories is not that easy. However, in order to manage and execute a customer-focused plan, you must be customer-centric as well.

CUSTOMER-CENTRIC MARKETING STRATEGY

A customer-centric marketing strategy goes beyond providing your customer with the best experience. It is also about your motivations behind wanting to provide your services to the customers, crafting a business strategy by understanding customer needs.

Amazon is one of the best examples of a customer-centric company. Customers have been clamoring for access to Amazon’s content anytime, anywhere. This convinced the company to partner with Vodafone, a company who shares their philosophy on customer experience. Together they developed the Kindle device which allows readers to access and download a vast number of digitized content wherever they go.

A company’s customer-centricity can be seen in the way they execute their customer-focused strategies. Customers get to judge the effectivity of your connection with them. Remember that the more you follow a customer-centric model, the better the customer experience is. You have to make sure, though, to involve everyone, from department heads to every employee.

CRAFTING A CUSTOMER-FOCUSED AND CUSTOMER-CENTRIC STRATEGY

As a brand, you should be able to show competence by delivering excellent customer experience and your motivations behind doing so should be customer-centric. Basically, you should proactively aim to have both.

To do this, you need to take a step back. Here are some of the ways you can learn about your customer and your own company philosophy.

ASSUMPTIONS WILL GET YOU INTO TROUBLE.

Trusting what your gut says doesn’t always work. There will be times when you will not understand a certain trend in sales, or why a segment of your audience is suddenly talking about a certain topic. So don’t assume that you know the behavior of your customers after only a few interactions with them.

You should constantly ask why they keep coming back to you even if there are others who offer the same kind of service or content. Be able to point out the elements that make them stay, and the ones that need improving. But never assume that something works, when actually, it doesn’t.

GETTING TO KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS

Strengthening and nurturing your relationship with your customers is important in a highly competitive market. To be able to do this, you have to get to know them. Think of ways to interact with them! For an e-Commerce site, the way to do it is to engage in conversation through your website or any digital platform.

You may also want to create customer surveys. Qeryz, for instance, allows you to interact with your customers by asking them questions that may or may not be strictly about a product or service that you offer without annoying them.

EVALUATE YOUR PHILOSOPHY.

Why are you doing this? Why are you in this business? Why are you concerned about customer opinions?

This goes back to our discussion on customer-centricity. Understand your intentions behind crafting a customer-focused plan. Are your intentions good? You should be able to learn the importance of being willing to do things right and do the right things for your customers.

Today, measuring your success is no longer about the return of investment. The strength of your relationship with your customers and their loyalty to your brand is what also determines if you’re a force in the market. Once you’ve adopted this view, you will see that with great customer-centricity comes great return of investment.