How to Build Your Customer Centric Marketing Strategy

“The customer is always right” is a saying that was coined back in the early 1900s, even then they got it right. In today’s customer centric digital world, we go above and beyond in our marketing strategies to ensure that the customer experience is exceptional, memorable and worthy of their loyalty. Build and nurture this relationship, after all, it takes precedence over your actual product and price tag that goes along with it. The data you will acquire from the customer journey has tremendous value for your company, the question is, are you hitting the mark? A study proved that “companies with a customer-centric, data-driven marketing and sales platform improve marketing ROI by 15-20% or more.” Intriguing, isn’t it?

Steps to Build a Successful Customer Centric Marketing Strategy

1. Plan - Identify Customer Needs

Start by learning the basics before reinventing the wheel. First and foremost, a customer centric strategy requires data to understand your customer, identify their needs and build upon that relationship. If you already have an e-commerce site and have combined it with a CRM, you’ve hit the jackpot!

• Collect detailed information regarding the client’s purchase history and preferences with a customer relationship management system (CRM).
• Use your site’s data analytics to track your customer’s journey, discover the pages they visited, the duration of their stay and the number of clicks.
• Break the silos by working closely with the sales and customer service teams to gather as much data as possible on the needs identified by leads and customers.
• Build a powerful marketing funnel to have a clear and structured process of the customer journey, from the awareness to the purchase stage and collect all pertinent data along the way.

2. Restructure Existing Content

Digital marketing strategies rely heavily on unique and relevant content to significantly contribute to the success of a company. Restructuring your existing content by categorizing it by persona and optimising the SEO of your pages will attract the right audience. You are basically refreshing your content and reorganizing it in a strategic manner with specific targets in mind. This simple marketing method proved to be extremely successful for a client, the SEO traffic of their blog increased by 150% in comparison to previous months. Seeing is believing!

3. Create New Content

Create a content calendar with all the data you acquired, base it on the defined personas and interests. Sending out clear and creative targeted content, at least once a week, is a full-proof customer centric marketing strategy. It will peak your clients’ and prospects’ interest, enhance their experience with your brand and assure positive engagement.

4. Communicate Between Departments

In order to have a coherent customer centric digital marketing strategy, it is essential to communicate between all departments, from the social media team, content team, marketing team, design and sales. Breaking the silos, sharing data and channeling all efforts with the same information and goal in mind is a key element in assuring satisfied customers and a successful strategy. Everyone must be on the same page, otherwise, it will confuse the customer and risk losing engagement.

5. Measure the Success of Your Customer Approach

You might be wondering what the customer churn rate is. Well, it is a number that many are afraid to look at but must in order to align with an effective customer centric digital marketing strategy. It is the percentage of customers that stopped using your products or services. Why is this number so important? Simple, retaining customers is much more cost-efficient than acquiring new ones. So, how can we get ahead of this issue? Survey your customers and gather opportunities to serve them better. Through the Net Promoter Score, monitor and maintain a high percentage of likelihood to recommend. Study the customer journey, listen to what they have to say, after all, the customer is always right!

In a Nutshell

Please keep in mind that building a successful customer centric digital marketing strategy requires long-term efforts, that is, if you want to maintain long-term relationships with your customers. Assume nothing, collect data, share it among all departments, be creative in content creation and target the audience you have and those you aim to acquire.

Always put your customer at the heart, or center, of your business, they will see it, feel it, and share their comments within their network therefore becoming loyal brand ambassadors.