Why we need a user-centric approach to marketing

This is a short summary of week 2 of my Growth Marketing Minidegree on CXL Institute.

It’s hard to sell to people you do not know. You’re probably not making enough sales because you don’t understand the people you’re selling to. The better you know them, the easier it is to persuade them to carry out an action.

That’s one of the downsides of traditional marketing, traditional marketers focus so much on selling products that appealing to the customer plays second fiddle. Traditional marketing is a clear-cut approach — the marketer informs customers about a new product by highlighting it’s benefits and why they should use it. It’s a lot of static and aggressive selling, it’s a one-size-fits-all, it’s advertising.

This approach is still very much popular but now digital has changed the relationship between a customer and a business. Digital has also impacted on the sales and marketing funnel. Marketers are now finding new ways to be innovative with how they convince customers to use their products or services. Gone are the days of selling ice to the eskimo. Now it’s about data, metrics and valuable data.

What is user centric marketing

Customer-centric marketing is an approach to marketing that focuses on customers’ needs and interests. It puts the customer at the core of your business. It’s based on the fact that all customers have different preferences and behaviours. This requires moving past a one-size-fits-all approach.

The most interesting part is; you can apply user-centric marketing techniques even if you have a limited budget and tight deadlines; User research and testing your campaigns don’t need to be time consuming or expensive. It can save both time and money because it ends the endless debate about the best approach and prevents you from adopting the wrong path.

User-centric marketing will allow you to spend your budget better and do more with less thanks to more word of mouth recommendations. That benefits both your business and you personally as you consistently exceed your targets.

Customer-centric marketing is able to outperform most other marketing approaches. Why? Because it enables you to combine a variety of rich insights on individual customers. It allows you to:

• Target the right customer with the right message, and through the right marketing channel.
• Gather a plethora of information on your customers’ buying behaviour, engagement, and interests.
• Identify unique opportunities to create a product or service that would fit the needs of your most valuable customers.
• Create a positive customer experience that helps to improve customer loyalty and leads to more repeat business.
• Maximize customer lifetime value by helping your product exceed customers’ expectations.

What are the benefits?

The importance of customer-centricity lies in its ability to improve profitability and ROI. User-centric products improve their marketing ROI by up to 20%. They are also 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on their customers.

Customer-centric marketing does have its share of challenges. Companies that have issues with becoming customer-centric usually struggle with:

• Changing company culture to align with customers’ needs
• Sharing customer information across departments
• Finding the right technology solutions to manage customer data

How to become customer-centric

A customer-centric company is able to predict customers’ needs, profitability and ROI. It knows which products customers need, even if they don’t know it themselves. Such a company is passionate about helping its customers. It understands what customers want and need, and creates services or products based on that understanding.

A lot of brands talk about the benefits of being user-centric, but so far, few are realising its potential. This can only be reached by placing the customer at the heart of every stage of your digital strategy, and that ultimately means changing how you do business through the following six steps:

1. Define the target audience

A digital strategy should start off with a clear understanding of who the audience is. Building personas and segments into the programme ensures your content will be relevant to the customer. Your digital strategy needs to be informed by a shared understanding of who your customers are, how they perceive the interactions they’re having with your company today, and what they want and need from your company in the future.

2. Learn

This is all about getting customer feedback on your company as they experience it now, and what they want and need in the future. Listening to the customer allows you to develop the content and process accordingly.

3. Align

Teams must be aligned to give the customer a consistently high standard across all departments, from marketing to sales and customer management. This is known as a “single customer view” and is especially important in the digital age with numerous channels of communication available.

4. Map

To achieve a single customer view, it is vital to use the tools now available to map each customer journey throughout the customer lifecycle. This will allow you to understand how to best guide each customer through the process of interacting with your brand online.

5. Transform

It is essential that your strategy is actually a company-wide strategy, and not simply a silo in marketing. A conscious culture shift needs to take place at every level, to reach a point where the customer is central to all aspects of the business.

6. Measure

Data can be used to ensure that everything from the customer’s first click, through to becoming a loyal customer, is carefully and usefully analysed, with all the necessary tools, measures and people in place to monitor and ultimately improve performance. Voice of the Customer Data is important to getting opinions and feedback too.

Tips for infusing customer-centric marketing into your company

• Assume nothing: collect data to understand your customers
• Use the long-term metrics to figure out how prospects and customers experience your brand
• Engage in marketing practices that offer real value
• Aim to delight at every point in your sales funnel
• Set the bar higher! Your mission is to create promoters — not just paying customers.

Changing the way you do business to make your digital strategy truly customer-centric is no simple task, requiring a shift in priorities and careful planning. But it will undoubtedly pay off, giving you that competitive edge to reap dividends many times over for the foreseeable future.

If you’re looking to advance your career in Growth Marketing, I highly recommend the CXL Institute Minidegree.