How Do You Create a Customer-centric Marketing Strategy?

Introduction 

With each passing day, consumers are presented with innumerable opportunities, making it harder for brands to capture and hold their interest. 

There is no need to be surprised by this. Today, customers in marketing gain uninterrupted access to a wide range of products, services, and information. All of it is available in real-time, thanks to today’s omnichannel and mobile-first environment. There is also the problem of being bombarded by a deluge of frequent marketing messages and of little relevance to them as soon as they engage with any online channel. 

Consumers are more likely to opt-out of marketing as soon as they are given the option. Approximately 44.7% of internet users installed an ad blocker on at least one device over the course of the year 2021. This led to a decrease in brand loyalty among marketing customers and an increase in marketing costs. 

If your potential customers see your advertisement, how do you ensure they do not roll their eyes when they see it? Ultimately, it all boils down to a timely, targeted campaign backed by a consumer-centric approach that puts the customer at the center of everything. That is the essence of customer-centric marketing, and it is what makes it so effective. Let’s examine this in more detail. 

What Is Customer-centric Marketing? 

So, what is customer centricity marketing approach? Customer-centric marketing is known as an approach to marketing that focuses on the interests and needs of customers and places them at the center of all decisions related to advertising, selling, and promoting products and services. 

To create effective customer-centricity marketing, you must understand why your customers need your company’s products and services. It is not just about business growth alone; it is about showing customers how your products/service will improve an aspect of their work or life in such a way that they will feel more satisfied with them. 

According to McKinsey, companies with data-driven, customer-centric marketing and sales platforms are able to increase their revenue from marketing by 15% to 20%. 

There is no doubt that customer centricity plays a significant role in a company’s growth and profitability. 

For example, Customer convenience is improved by Amazon’s personalization. Curated recommendations heavily influence Amazon’s sales. According to recent statistics, 35 percent of Amazon’s sales are driven by personalized recommendations. Recommended products are based on the customer’s purchase history, the items in their cart, the items they viewed recently, and the items other customers have purchased. While making shopping more convenient for customers, this algorithm creates immense value for Amazon. 

In addition to retaining existing customers, personalization helps attract new ones. According to surveys, 86 percent of customers believe personalized recommendations influence their purchase decisions, while 56 percent are more likely to return to a website that delivers personalized recommendations. The crux is that personalization offers robust benefits to organizations through improved customer experiences, even if not every organization can gather and process data on the scale that Amazon can. 

The 5 Ways to Create A Customer-centric Marketing Strategy 

Let’s learn the top 5 ways to achieve a customer-centric marketing strategy: 

Build Customer Knowledge Reservoirs 

A client-centric organization places a high level of emphasis on accountability as one of its core characteristics. In other words, every employee or team should be held accountable for a certain aspect of the process in question. 

The salesforce, for example, is responsible for forwarding customer queries to the support department for response. A support staff member is responsible for ensuring that the contents of customer conversations are directed to the right person within the product team. Among the responsibilities of PMs is to decide whether and when to act upon feedback that they receive. It is the responsibility of the designers to develop solutions, engineers to implement those solutions, and project managers to communicate back to the customers their progress on your project. 

What exactly does all of this mean? An organization that is not designed to have customer-centricity makes it difficult for a product team to accrue a large library of customer knowledge within the organization. There is an opposite effect as well: if the product builders don’t listen to their customers, they won’t be able to build a successful product. 

Use Customer Knowledge 

Suppose that your organization is able to collect and pass along your customers’ feedback thoroughly and reliably — or at the very least, that you are listening to them as much as possible. What is the relationship between this information reservoir and the product roadmap? 

In order to build customer-centric icon products, product teams should pay attention to the voice of the customer throughout the product development process, i.e., before you build a product, during the process, and after it has been built. 

Suppose you’re going to implement new features, re-design pages, and flows, or even expand and advance your vision forward. In that case, you must consider what your customers need and their experience when deciding what new features to implement. 

It is likely that those decisions will be determined by answering questions such as: What are users wishing they could do? Do they have any dissatisfaction with the service? How can you provide them with the most value? What can you do to make their lives easier? As your team listens to customer feedback through all the different channels they have access to; the answers will come from what they hear. 

There are times when it is the same complaint that 100 different people have sent through the feedback funnel at the same time. Sometimes there are a dozen requests for features that are all trying to solve the same problem, but you find the common thread and the smartest way to solve the problem for one. A high-value client may send you a bulleted list of a number of very specific things they want you to do for them, including a time frame and a budget. 

There is no doubt that you cannot, and should not, satisfy all of your client’s needs — and being customer-centric does not entail doing everything in your power to meet each one of their needs. 

Establish A Roadmap That Is Prioritized For Users And The Business 

How do you go about capturing a wide variety of product possibilities once you’ve cast the net and come up with a running list of potential products and then dealt with them in a way that’s both business-savvy and customer-centric? As a matter of fact, there is a formula that can be followed: 

(Value / Complexity) x Necessity^2 

Where, Value: marketability, breadth of effort, usefulness 

In a similar fashion to marketability, this is a number that is primarily determined by  

• How many users are affected by it? 
• The company and/or customers benefit from this feature. 

Complexity: difficulty, opportunity cost, time commitment 

It is a measure of the complexity of building the feature, which is based on factors such as the number of new elements or flows required, the difficulty in designing and coding them, and the time it will take to complete it all. 

Necessity: centrality to the experience, urgency 

A measure of how urgently it is needed, either as a nice-to-have or as a necessity. In order to receive a high score, you must include a new feature, an upgrade, or a fix that resolves an active problem, especially one that’s causing actual losses in the business. There is a lower score given to customers for cool ideas that are not essential to the experience. 

Build Strategy With The Customer In Mind 

User experience design is at the core of this phase. The customer-centric team focuses on designing and delivering an intuitive and user-friendly user experience during the implementation phase. Designing the user experience is really just a reframe of the design process. Design is a process of crafting a holistic experience that accounts for every detail of a user’s journey from beginning to end, putting a strong emphasis on solving problems for the user. Product teams can create exceptional user experiences by following solid design practices, empathizing with users, and iterating. 

Communicating The Updates With The Customers 

Someone should be responsible for communicating the changes to the customer after you’ve implemented a new feature request. Communication establishes trust, and transparency about delivery timelines is essential. If you respond quickly to customers’ feature requests, you will gain goodwill, but even a slower response will be appreciated as long as you communicate with them. The feature is not really “done,” though, and it will continue to improve over time as more testing is conducted and new designs are iterated. 

Why Is It Crucial To Be Customer-centric? 

An approach based on channels might seem intuitive from a marketing standpoint, but it actually obstructs your ability to gain insights.  

For example, you may spend more on PPC marketing if you find it’s driving the most revenue. It’s important to realize that many PPC campaigns are supported by other media channels, like your social media or television advertisements. A campaign’s potential is severely limited if it does not include top and mid-funnel activities. 

The goal of marketing is not to spread your message across multiple channels; your team will achieve the best results if your customer-centric approach is taken to marketing. To “optimize spending, increase attention, and maximize satisfaction,” brands need to become more customer-centric. 

Conclusion 

Taking a customer-centric approach can seem strange at first. If you focus on meeting your target customer’s needs instead of filling up a funnel with qualified leads. In the long run, a business that fulfills its customer’s needs and is truly helpful will be sustainable. 

So now you might know how to create a customer-centric marketing strategy. For professional knowledge in this field, you must check out UNext Jigsaw’s Product Management course in order to have a clear view of creating a customer-centric marketing approach.