Customer-centric marketing is an overarching strategy focused on customer needs, taking their experiences with products, brands, and any advertising messages into consideration. It may sound obvious, but the most critical thing you should focus on in creating a customer-centric marketing strategy is understanding who your customers are and how you can serve their needs. By thinking like the customer, by understanding needs along with wants, a customer-centric business can ensure the customers long-term experience is optimised.

This form of marketing attempts to determine what products and services fit each customers wants. Customer-centricity goes beyond the individual sale and focuses on a customer’s lifelong value to the business.

Customer-centric companies generally have segmentation that is built around customer lifetime value, and they focus their efforts around relationships and needs with their core customers. By placing customers at the centre of each and every interaction with them, customer-centric businesses are able to provide a dynamic, seamless, and uniquely tailored customer experience that helps customers reach the desired outcomes, which eventually drives sales. This is a business strategy based on placing the customer at the forefront and heart of the business in order to deliver a positive experience and establish a lasting relationship.

Taking a customer-centric approach to marketing requires identifying and prioritising the right segments of customers, building full-funnel strategies to reach them, and quickly testing, measuring, and activating your learnings. A testing road map based on customer’s needs sophisticated measurement capabilities to see how well marketing is reaching customers, driving increased life-time value, and efficiently growing the customer base.

By having a customer-centric approach you start by taking time to understand and segment your customer base, then define you full-funnel strategies to reach them, followed by testing and acting on the results of your learnings to enhance the effectiveness of your marketing. By creating focused strategies, companies can build a positive customer experience, which in turn strengthens the customer relationship.

By combining these factors, companies can enhance their customer experience and marketing strategies. By identifying motivations that drive customers to buy specific services or products, businesses can execute branding strategies related to those needs and expectations. Including customer feedback in a business central strategy, a company’s executives can recognise customer trends, track potential risks, and create processes to continually improve products or services by harnessing insights from customer feedback.

If you integrate customer feedback into your practices, you can improve your products and their perceived value to every new customer. Customers who become dependent on your products will never consider leaving your brand, provided that your products are comprised of quality engagement strategies that deliver consistent value to your customers.

The fact is customers are becoming channel-agnostic and they expect consistent experiences at all possible points of contact provided by the brand. With 76% of consumers and corporate buyers saying that it is easier than ever for them to take their business elsewhere, pressure is on for organisations to do the right thing by customers.

In a recent survey, 45.9 percent of companies said that customer experience is the number one priority, ahead of price and products. In fact, several studies indicate that very soon, customer experience will become a key differentiator for brands, taking precedence over pricing or products.

Retailers recognise it is important to put customers first, and 94% of them believe that they are given customer-centric marketing experiences. Salesforces Trends in Integrated Customer Experiences report found 70 percent of customers said that integrated experiences, like seamless transfers across departments and contextualised engagements informed by prior interactions, are essential for winning their business. Companies investing in their customer experiences are seeing financial benefits as well as strong customer-centric cultures.

By including a customer-centric core value, you are providing a piece the entire team can rally behind. When you create solutions with customers at heart, this is reflected throughout aspects of your company, such as marketing, sales, support, products, and customer experience.

Strategy defines how you drive and manage growth, how you provide products and services to customers, and how you approach the whole company. The purpose is not just to grow business; it is growth driven by showing how your products or services improve aspects of customers’ professional or personal lives. A simple philosophy on sales points can also help the marketing team and agency focus their efforts on strategies that will deliver lasting business value, targeting and producing customers of higher value who have consistent loyalty.

While you can keep the mission statements in place and keep your eyes focused on the core values for the business’ success, a simple selling point philosophy can make all the difference in the way you approach marketing efforts. Your marketing strategy includes everything from paid advertising, your social media presence, the product itself, and customer service. Knowing what each of your customers or prospects expects, wants, or needs is a cornerstone to any solid digital marketing strategy.

Today, just 14% of marketers report customer-centricity is the distinguishing feature of their companies. As marketers, we strive to identify relevant, high-value customer segments and uniquely position our brands and products to them.

Strong customer-centric marketers understand each of their touch-points roles on the customer journey, then craft messages and creatives tailored for that audiences moment of time on their journey, identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and measure how customers react. Customer-centric product organisations work collaboratively to share customer stories and feedback with other departments, as well as give individuals throughout the organisation access to key pieces of context that can allow them to become more customer-centric in their approach. The purpose of customer-centric marketing is to customise each brand interaction to meet a customer’s needs or interests and also to figure out why their product or service matters to them, and make sure that they are meeting that goal, while also cultivating a healthy customer relationship.

Useful Links:

https://www.bluleadz.com/blog/customer-centricity-strategy-for-future-growth

https://exponea.com/blog/customer-centric-marketing/

https://quuu.co/blog/customer-centric-marketing-strategy/

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-centric

https://imcprofessional.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/customer-centric-marketing-and-digital-intimacy

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/how-to-create-a-customer-centric-experience/

https://www.wonderflow.ai/blog/the-3-pillars-of-customer-centricity

https://www.spiralytics.com/blog/customer-centric-digital-marketing/

https://ovative.com/insights/customer-centric-marketing/

https://www.alida.com/the-alida-journal/customer-centric-versus-customer-focused

https://www.superoffice.com/blog/how-to-create-a-customer-centric-strategy/