It goes without saying that your customers are the backbone of your business; without them, there’s simply no business to sustain. That’s why, as competition becomes increasingly fierce and customer expectations intensify, it’s essential that your marketing strategy places the customer at the center of the experience. While a customer-centric marketing strategy may seem obvious, in practice it can be much more complex than what you might expect.
That’s why we’ll be diving deep into the concept of customer-centric marketing. We’ll explore what it really means to put the customer at the heart of your business, how to create a customer-centric marketing strategy, and the benefits you stand to gain by implementing it.
What Is Customer-Centric Marketing?
True to its name, a client or customer-centric marketing strategy seeks to place customers at the center of every decision there is to make in your marketing and media strategy. It’s a tactic that aims to provide value to customers at every touchpoint and interaction with the brand.
Unlike a traditional marketing approach, which focuses on selling your brand to customers, customer-centric marketing requires you to prioritize customer needs and preferences to create tailored media and messaging efforts. It relies on your intuition as a marketer, blended with solid customer data.
Benefits of a Customer-Centric Approach
When you put your customers first, good things are bound to follow—happy customers, happy business. Your business thriving and growing is directly tied to your customers’ satisfaction. That said, here are some tangible business goals you may achieve by implementing a client-centric strategy:
- Increased Customer Loyalty: Loyal customers are a pivotal driver of business growth. When customers feel valued and understood, they are more likely to become repeat customers or loyalists, which translates to more sales and revenue.
- Enhanced Brand Reputation: A customer-centric approach can help improve your business’s reputation because satisfied customers are more likely to speak highly about your services and products to others, building an organic network of positive support.
- Higher ROI: Implementing more targeted and personalized marketing efforts leads to better results in terms of conversion rates. This means that the efforts and resources you channel towards marketing get positive and higher returns.
- Greater Customer Insights: Building stronger connections with your customers enables you to unlock a better understanding of their preferences and needs, providing valuable insights that inform your marketing tactics and product or service development.
- Free Brand Advocacy: When customers share positive experiences about your brand, they have the ability to convert prospects into paying customers. This not only saves you the trouble of prospecting (budget-wise), but it also increases your revenue flows.
Examples of Successful Client-Centric Marketing Campaigns
Customer-centric marketing isn’t just a fancy buzzword that gets thrown around in marketing dialect—it’s a tried, tested, and proven method that’s worked for some of the most successful brands in the world. Here, we look at several examples of customer-centric companies that successfully implemented this strategy and earned strong returns:
Bacardi’s Live-streamed Tasting Event
While primarily known for producing some of the best rum, in 2019, Barcadi wanted to raise awareness and drive sales up for its new single-malt whisky collection in the UK and Germany. The brand’s marketing team came up with a genius idea to transform its buying customers’ living rooms into tasting rooms. Customers could sample the whiskies alongside others, and with the lead of whisky experts.
To bring this to life, Barcadi teamed up with Amazon – If customers purchased their whisky on the e-commerce website, they’d receive a link to access the livestream. The strategy was so successful that Barcadi has gone on record to reveal that customers asked over 500 questions during the live-streamed tasting event. Additionally, following the event, Barcadi saw an increase in sales of their new whisky collection on Amazon.
Sephora’s Beauty Insider Program
In 2007, makeup and beauty products seller Sephora launched a loyalty program in a bid to increase customer loyalty and encourage repeat business. The (tiered) loyalty program dubbed “My Beauty Insider” aimed to reward its customers with points after purchasing products from any of its stores. Customers could then redeem these points for several benefits, including free shipping, early access to sales and special events, discounts, and free birthday gifts.
Still running to this day, the program is highly personalized, with rewards and recommendations tailored to individuals. Sephora is able to do this by gathering data on customer behavior and their preferences to provide personalized beauty advice and product suggestions. This customer-centric marketing has been so successful that research indicates that the program comprises over 17 million customers in just the U.S., who, by the way, make up 80 percent of Sephora’s customer base.
Stitch Fix’s Shop Your Looks
Online clothes shopping can be extremely challenging—from not getting the right sizes to not liking a piece’s fit once you receive it. Stitch Fix, an online personal styling service, identified these challenges and sought to eliminate them.
It starts with a customer creating an account with the company on its website. They then fill out a personalized quiz on their preferences on size, style, color, budget, favorite brands, etc. This data, as well as purchase history and trends, is analyzed by AI and machine learning. A human stylist then reviews these insights and curates recommended styles and outfits, tailored for each individual. Once shipped, customers can try the outfits, keep what they like, and ship back what they don’t like. This campaign has paid off because data indicates that Stitch Fix has over 3.5 million customers so far with reports that this number increases every year by 17 percent.
Tips for Developing a Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy
Now that you have an overview of how a customer-centric approach works, let’s get into the specifics of how to create one.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Your customers are the most important puzzle piece in your strategy. Really understand your customers to the core, and you’ll have struck gold. But what does it mean to understand your audience? One thing’s for sure: it goes beyond basic demographics like age, gender, or location. While demographics are important, understanding their needs, desires, pain points, and motivations are the sweet spot to truly gaining an “intimate” understanding of your target audience. When you understand what drives your customers, you can tailor your messaging, products, and services to resonate with them on a personal level.
To achieve this level of understanding, there are several steps you can follow. These include:
Step 1: Start by creating detailed customer personas. These personas should represent the various segments of your audience, incorporating not just who they are but what they care about. Consider their challenges, goals, and what influences their purchasing decisions. For example, a young professional might prioritize convenience and efficiency in their purchases, while a parent might focus on value and safety. Mapping out these personas helps you create more targeted marketing campaigns that speak directly to each segment’s unique needs.
Step 2: Engage your audience directly. Conduct surveys, hold focus groups, and encourage feedback through reviews and social media interactions. This direct line of communication allows you to hear firsthand what your customers think and feel about your brand, products, and services. It also gives you the opportunity to address any concerns or issues they may have, further strengthening your relationship with them.
Step 3: Rediscover your audience, time after time again. Understanding your target audience is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process. As your business evolves and your customer base grows, their needs and expectations may change. Regularly revisiting and updating your customer personas, along with continuously gathering and analyzing data, ensures that your marketing strategies remain aligned with your customers’ evolving preferences.
Utilizing Data for Deep Understanding of Customers
Once you have a baseline understanding of your customers, the work’s not done yet. You must refine this understanding by leveraging the vast amounts of customer data available to you. Think: social media platforms, your website, news articles—basically any digital touchpoint your customer interacts with your brand.
For instance, if you were to collect data from your business’s website, you’d examine factors like the pages your customers visit most frequently, how long they spend on your site, what content they engage with the most, etc. Examining these behavior patterns can help identify what truly captures their interest and tailor your content to meet their expectations.
In addition to behavior data, customer feedback and engagement metrics are invaluable. Reviews, comments, and direct feedback provide qualitative insights into how your customers perceive your brand and products. This information helps you understand not only what they like but also areas where you can improve. Therefore, you must pay attention to both positive and negative feedback, as each offers a learning opportunity to refine your approach.
You can access this data by leveraging several tools and media, including:
- Google Analytics to show you detailed reports on user behavior, traffic sources, and conversion rates on your website. This can help give you a clear picture of how customers navigate your online presence.
- Social media insights to provide data on engagement levels and help you understand which content resonates the most with your audience.
- AI-driven data science tools, such as AUDIENCEX Intelligence (AXi), which can rapidly analyze your own first-party data to gather behavioral insights, provide visibility into customer journeys and touchpoints, and model custom audiences.
This data—quantitative (such as click-through rates, time spent on site, and purchase history) and qualitative (like customer reviews and social media comments) —is essential for building a rich, multi-dimensional understanding of your audience, so it’s essential to collect it.
Mapping the Customer Journey
The customer journey is the complete experience that a customer takes with your brand, from their initial awareness of your product or service to their post-purchase interactions and beyond. Mapping this journey allows you to visualize and understand the various touchpoints where customers interact with your brand. It helps you see your brand through the eyes of your customers, thus allowing you to identify potential pain points, understand the motivations behind customer actions, and uncover opportunities to improve their experience.
Moreover, a well-mapped customer journey helps you to personalize your marketing efforts. When you know where a customer is in their journey, you can tailor your messaging and offers to meet their specific needs at each stage.
Step 1: The first step in customer journey mapping is identifying the key stages that your customers go through. These stages typically include awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and post-purchase. However, these may vary, increase, or decrease, depending on your industry and business model.
Step 2: Next, determine the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand. Touchpoints can include anything from visiting your website, engaging with social media posts, receiving email communications to interacting with customer service. It’s incredibly important to identify both online and offline touchpoints to get a complete picture of the customer journey.
Step 3: Ask customers about their experiences at different stages of their journey, what challenges they faced, and what they found most valuable. This qualitative data will help you understand the emotional and cognitive aspects of their journey, which are critical for creating a truly customer-centric experience.
Step 4: With all this information, you can now create a visual representation of the customer journey, known as a customer journey map. This map should detail each stage of the journey, the associated touchpoints, customer thoughts and emotions, and any pain points or opportunities for improvement.
Available through the AXi suite, our own AXi Explorer tool can help with this stage. It provides custom data visualization and a transparent view into performance data across all channels, enabling you to gain deep insight on each touchpoint in the customer journey.
Analyzing Customer Feedback
Once you complete your customer journey map, it’s time to analyze customer feedback in detail. By now, you probably have vast amounts of customer data. However, having it and knowing what to do with it are two very different things.
The first step you should do to effectively analyze customer feedback is to categorize into different themes or areas of concern. For example, you might categorize feedback into areas such as product quality, customer service, website usability, and pricing.
Once you’ve organized the feedback, prioritize the issues you need to address. This may mean focusing on the feedback that appears most frequently or has the greatest potential impact on customer satisfaction. For instance, if you discover multiple complaints about the same product defect, you should address that issue promptly.
Adding Value to Every Interaction
It’s not enough to simply engage your audience; each interaction—whether that may be through omnichannel and multichannel marketing—must serve a purpose. You must offer something meaningful that enhances their customer experience with your brand. This is crucial as it differentiates your brand in a crowded marketplace, where customers get bombarded with marketing messages.
So, what exactly is value? Well, depending on your industry and customer base, it can take many different forms. It can be the quality of your product, the level of customer service you provide, the educational content you share, or the personalized offers you extend. The key is to ensure that each interaction leaves the customer feeling satisfied, informed, or cared for. That said, there are several strategies you can leverage to create value at any touchpoint, including:
- Personalization: Use the data and insights you’ve gathered to tailor your content, offers, and communications to individual customer preferences. For instance, if you know that a customer frequently purchases a particular product, you can offer them a discount on a complementary item. Or, if a customer has shown interest in a specific topic, send them educational content that aligns with their interests.
- Educational Content: Provide your customers with content that helps them solve a problem, learn something new, or get more out of your product. This could be in the form of blog posts, video tutorials, webinars, or e-books.
- Exceptional Customer Service: Ensure that your customer service team is well-trained, responsive, and empathetic. Quick and effective resolution of issues, proactive follow-ups, and going the extra mile to assist customers can turn a potentially negative experience into a positive one. Additionally, offering multiple channels for support—such as live chat, phone, and email—ensures that customers can reach out in the way that’s most convenient for them.
Ensure a Customer-Centric Approach With the Best Advertising Tech
Customers have thousands of options today, and it’s easier and faster than ever for them to choose another brand if you lag behind your competitors. If one company or product can’t meet their needs, they’ll simply move on to the next. That’s why really taking time to deeply understand your audience and their unique needs is so crucial.
While creating a customer-centric marketing approach might sound straightforward on paper, it requires a combination of human expertise and advanced data and technology to do it effectively. At AUDIENCEX, we have everything you need to build and launch a true customer-centric strategy. Our innovative technology, privacy-safe data science, seamless media access and deep industry knowledge enable you to not only gather detailed customer insights but leverage those insights to craft highly personalized marketing strategies. Our expert teams effectively leverage our proprietary blend of the most advanced tools for precise predictive targeting, real-time analytics, and AI-driven performance, ensuring that your marketing efforts are always aligned with your customers’ needs and preferences. Driven by in-depth data and custom holistic strategies, our creative and media experts craft messages that will resonate with your customers and engage them across the ideal mix of channels.
Across every discipline, our team functions effectively as an extension of your own, working to deeply understand brands and audiences, as well as each campaign’s individual needs and goals. With experience spanning industries and channels, we bring our dedication and expertise to every campaign, delivering exceptional results on every ad spend. Whether you’re an in-house brand marketer or work across many brands at an agency, our team and solutions can support your goals. Reach out to us today to be connected with a member of our team and explore what we can help you achieve.