Customer-centric marketing describes a marketing approach focused not on what’s best for the company – but on what’s best for your customers. If your company follows marketing best practices, you’re probably already doing user research, collecting customer feedback, and thinking about how to convert prospects into customers with targeted and personalized messaging
What is Customer-Centric Marketing?
An approach to marketing that prioritizes customers’ needs and interests in all decisions related to advertising, selling, and promoting products and services
- Successful customer-centric marketing requires understanding why your customers need what your company provides
- It’s growth driven by showing customers how your product/service will improve some aspect of their work or life
Build Infrastructure Around the Customer
Customer-centric marketing needs to be hyper-personalized to be effective
- Customers need to be segmented in your systems to effectively speak to each individual person
- Design tools to accomplish customer goals, and the business’s success will flow from that
Collect feedback and iterate
Part of being customer-centric is continuing to listen, adapt, and respond to changing customer cues
- Being customer centric means understanding the customer’s point of view and respecting the customer’s interest
- A closed-loop feedback system will mean constantly shifting your marketing strategy to be better
Build your customer-centric marketing strategy
Shifting your focus from filling up a funnel with qualified leads to meeting the needs of your target customers will take time, but the payoff is a more rewarding way of doing business
- Fulfilling your customers’ needs and being truly helpful results in stronger relationships, which means a more sustainable business in the long run
Start with senior leadership
A shift in company strategy is always more effective if it’s supported by those at the top
- The fundamental skill required for this inspirational leadership is “centeredness”
- When leaders demonstrate these qualities internally, employees feel confident reflecting this way of doing things with customers as well
Customer Success
Put the power into your customers’ hands and help them to become their best selves
- Create a community for customer success professionals to grow their skills and knowledge through Gainsight University and their Pulse conferences
- Work to advance the interests of the customer success industry overall
Get to Know Your Customers
Conduct one-on-one interviews with current or former customers
- Send surveys out to customers to get mass feedback on a specific set of questions
- Use social media monitoring tools to see what people are saying about your company online
- Spend time helping your support team by reading and responding to customer emails
- Jump on calls with your sales team or listen to recordings of their calls with prospects
Publish content your customers want and need to read
A customer-centric marketing team builds its content in a very specific way so that it’s helpful to customers, even if it doesn’t directly sell or promote their product.
- Ask yourself these four questions: Who are the customers you’re trying to reach? What are their personas?
- What are the other problems they face? How can your brand work on solving those?
Customer advocacy
Uncover what your customers really want from your relationship
- Create more helpful resources to help them get better at their jobs
- Advocacy goes both ways
- Be an advocate for your customers so your customers will want to advocate for you
- Craft experiences that evoke emotion
Long-term strategy
Customer-centric marketers avoid short-term wins in favor of creating long-term value
- A narrow focus on leads to the exclusion of all else drives marketing tactics that no one likes
- This will degrade brand integrity and leave you with more detractors than promoters
