How to Grow Your Business with Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

Customer-centric marketing is a marketing approach designed to prioritize clients and place each specific consumer at the core of marketing structure and delivery.

Learning about your customer behaviors is a great way to build your customer experience and deliver better services or products to your customers.

Research by Walker shows that many brands prefer experience to products or prices.

Building a great customer-centric strategy starts by realizing that there is no such thing as an “average” customer since each customer has different preferences and behaviors.

Thus, the “one-size-fits-all” marketing approach is not valid. Research by Walter shows that 62% of companies invest resources in understanding their customers better.

The above research is supported by the Supper Office report that shows customer experience is among the top exiting opportunity for brands.

Benefits of customer-centric marketing strategy

There is a huge business value in customer-centricity. Through the customer’s eyes, you get to find solutions to challenges that keep you up all night.

Here are some of the common customer-centricity benefits that your brand can get with a customer-centric marketing strategy.

Identifying opportunities for growth

Customer-centric marketing gives companies a chance to identify and take advantage of opportunities such as unfulfilled customer needs for growth.

For instance, through customer surveys, an electronics company might find out that most of its customers are women and they rely on others’ help in installing equipment in their homes. This can lead to the expansion of the company by offering home installation services.

Promoting new value

Through customer centricity, you are always tracking and attending to customers to satisfy them.

Satisfied customers have a likelihood of renewing and becoming brand ambassadors who talk good about your business to other potential clients and this may bring new customers to your doorstep.

Market share and profit

Since most markets are overwhelmed with suppliers, the key to increasing profits is maintaining and increasing the market share.

You risk losing your customers to competitors with similar products and better shopping experiences if you don’t focus on customer needs.

While failure to execute the customer-centric strategy might save money, the result can be a long-term decrease in market share and lower profit.

Reduces customer churn rate

Many potential customers do use a brand for some time but leave and join your business competitors.

Research by Statista showed a churn rate of 22% for online retail shops in the US.

However, with a great customer-centric marketing strategy, you know what your customers want and provide them exactly what they want.

It will help you reduce the rate at which these customers leave your business to other businesses.

Tips to Grow your Business

Let’s be realistic. Scaling your business is not an easy task. It requires a lot of effort to generate leads and convert them into loyal customers. Here are some tips to

Here are some tips to grow your business

Engage Customers through all the Buyer Stages

Most of the time before becoming a customer, an individual will go through the sales funnel. It consists of different stages that lead a customer to their purchase.

For them to decide whether to purchase from you, you need to:

• Create high-quality content

According to the research by Content Marketing Institute, most businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy.

You should ensure you create a content strategy, document it, and create high-quality content for your target market. Once you treat it as a strategy worth investing in, your business will succeed.

Your content should be user-friendly and provide in-depth information that engages, attracts, and educates your readers as you build trust with them and nurture them through the sales cycle.

• Help them understand your products/services

The products and services you are offering may cause great confusion and indecisiveness to new customers when reviewing since they are not familiar with them.

Therefore, to increase your sales velocity you need to align the customer’s state of mind with a comprehensive understanding of what you are selling.

For existing customers, optimizing their experience is the key to fostering loyalty.

Research your Customers

You need to research your customers regularly to understand what they want when they want it and how they want your product or service delivered to them.

• Learn their pain points and personal interests

Customers have different pain points. They can be experiencing challenges pains like Trying to generate more leads and traffic.

The pains can also be increasing their brand awareness, building more trust with customers, or increasing sales. When you know what your customers want you are in a better position to serve them better.

Identifying customer pain points is very crucial to you as a marketer.  The pain points help you solve your target customers’ problems and increase your brand sales and ROI.

Ask questions that concern the customer’s needs.

Your customers are a great source of information.  It’s no secret! By talking to them, you gain a clear understanding of your market, competition, and referrals.

With good questions about the customers’ needs, such as “what is one thing that no vendor does that you would like them to do?”.

Asking customers questions helps you know more about them and their challenges.

You can use their feedback to provide better services or products to solve their challenges.

• Everything you do start with your customers (let them know what’s in for them).

Customers always want to know that you care about their feelings and your goal is to be a solution to their problems.

Your business reputation, client retention, and sales volume depending on your customers’ empathy.

• Give them the best customer experience

To thrive and make profits, your business relies on your customers’ experience. Your top priority is to make sure your customer gets the best experience any time he or she patronizes your business. The most exciting business opportunity is the customer experience.

Research by iperceptions shows that 66% of customers say they will pay more for services or products with great user experience.

Collect Customer Feedback

The depth of information you can gather from a customer is of great help in developing your customer-centric marketing strategy.

Here are some tools to use to collect feedback

Typeform

Typeform tool had an interface that is very user-friendly to combine surveys.

The tool is simple to use and has awesome features that help you capture your target readers’ feedback in a great way. If you are still interested in using the tool here is its pricing.

Customersure

The customer sure collects information by sending surveys through email. Your customers fill them out and in the customer service dashboard, you find the feedback.

It allows you to run customer satisfaction over time and if you are interested in more than just customer feedback the extra features such as HelpDesk and Reviews, make it reliable. This is how the tool will cost you if you decide to use it.

UserEcho

UserEcho is a software tool that offers different features consisting of feedback, knowledge base, helpdesk, forum, and live chat.

It also enables you to conclude what your customers like and dislike by offering a voting system and has more than 27K users.

It also has an option where your visitors can send requests privately through a ticketing system. And here is the cost of the software.

You can also integrate the tool with the following sites.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is the most used survey tool by millions of businesses across the world.

The tool is very flexible and has about 15 different questions such as Likert scales and open comments.

For one-off surveys, it is the perfect tool however it’s not appropriate for measuring overall fulfillment or giving another chance to surveying customers after a period of time. Check out how it works here:

There are different templates you can get from the website to help you in creating your surveys.

You also need to know how the software costs and the different features it has. You can also integrate the tool with other softwares as you collect data. So here is its pricing package.

Drift

Drift is the first survey platform that aims at turning the internet into a conversation.

It allows the marketer to make surveys an integral part of the conversation and get to know your customers better. Here are its products.

It’s a great site to help you create your chatbot for communication with your clients. You can visit its site for more information.

Hotjar

Hotjar is software that puts together multiple UX tools in one. For this reason, it does not have a solid CX solution.

You can collect feedback from customers in different languages. Here are the amazing features of the tool.

Hotjar tool helps you create tracking sessions, heatmaps as well as customize feedback pools and surveys. Below is the cost of using the tool.

Qualaroo

With Qualaroo, you can customize your user research goals and get customer feedback.

With its advanced targeting capabilities, you can target hyper-specific user insights virtually based on anything you want to track.

Here is how the tool works. You can also integrate the tool with other softwares to collect customer insights as you grow your brand.

Check out the pricing of the tool.

Here is some more information about the pricing of Qualaroo software.

Survicate

With survicate, you can send questionnaires by email to different customers as well as trigger surveys at targeted locations on your website.

This tool is also capable of dashboarding in terms of analysis. It also gives users the privilege of choosing predefined surveys from a library and had different great features.

You want to budget and use the tool? Here is how much you will spend.

Here are some tools you can integrate survicate tools as you improve your brand, collect customer data and deliver the best user experience for your clients.

Reevoo

Reevoo is a high-end customer service feedback tool that offers assessment at a product level other than generic reviews for webshops. Here are the great ways the tool helps connect your brand with its customers.

For it to show several reviews on a product level, it runs on-site product pages.  Visitors can ask an owner about a review. Visit the website and ask for a quote on their pricing model for their services.

UseResponse

It provides you with a platform that you can use an open-sourced code to host yourself.

You also have a chance to access live chat with the client and not only feedback and a forum. Here are some of its great features.

Here are other tools you can integrate with the UseResponse tool.

And here is how the tool costs.

Ways to Collect the Feedback

Do you always hope you could get answers directly from your customers as you develop your customer-centric marketing strategy? Customer feedback is all about that. To collect the feedback, you need the approach below:

Call your customers directly

You can personalize your direct calls to your target customers. This method is highly effective. It’s a great way to get information from your customers on how to help them in their pain points.

Track your customer data

Tracking your customer data through web analysis makes it easy for you to figure out those pages getting a lot of attention and those that the customers are turning away from.

By logging in to your Google analytics, you can find information about your bounce rate. The tool tracks different data for your brand growth.

Using that data can help you offer better services or products for your customers.

Use LiveChat on your website

Initiating a live chat for website visitors is also another great way to get feedback from customers or potential customers.

Live chat tools are convenient for customers to use. The best places to put live chat are your checkout page and pricing page.

You can also place the chatbot on any page you want as long as it helps you get the feedback you want. Here is an example of a live chat on a website.

Engage customers through content

With the right strategy and a clear understanding of your audience, you get customers to interact with your brand through the content on your website. You need a great website theme to display your content attractively as you engage your customers.

Social media gives you a great chance to work on the user experience and respond quickly to any arising issue.

Here is an example of customer feedback on social media.

Send short surveys

This is the easiest way to get feedback. You can catch the attention of your clients by simply embedding the survey in a pop-up.

To achieve the most out of your online survey check out the best survey practices.

Send your customers emails

The best thing about an email survey is that you can get information regarding the entire shopping experience.

However, you should not send emails after every purchase as this may annoy the clients. SurveyMonkey is the best tool to send out email surveys.

Offer incentives

At some point, to get feedback, you will have to persuade your customers. You can offer a lead magnet for the sake of completing a survey.

Usability tests

Usability tests provide you with honest feedback from users thus, you making you aware of the issues with your app or your website.

This gives you a chance to launch better and less wasted resources. Whatever feedback you get, ensure you work on it as soon as possible.

Create an FAQ page

To reduce the number of customer service inquiries you receive, in addition to improving the response rate, you need to collect all the questions clients ask and create a page answering all the questions.

Ensure you answer the frequently asked questions with an understanding of the customers’ perspectives and feelings in mind.

Customer Service Training

Customer service is the key to the thriving of any business.

Training your employees and salespersons on how to handle customers and give them the best they deserve can resonate with customers’ loyalty years to come.

Create an Online Community

Online communities play a big role in seeking out reviews and recommendations from clients before making a decision.

• Share stories with them

This is the best way to break the ice with your online community. Most people are on social media to connect, get entertained, and gather information. For your business to grow, you need to act like the friendly organization you are and share your stories.

• Engage them with your brand

Engaging customers with your brand might excite them therefore, get their friends to join. They will ask how they can help and also talk about your brand both online and offline.

• Learn how you can serve them better

You are not as smart as your customers collectively. Giving them control through the online community allows you to learn what you can do to serve them better.

Use the Power of Influencer Marketing

You need to link your brand with influencers that your customers can trust for you to have effective influencer marketing. It’s a great and effective approach to your customer-centric marketing strategy. Customer trust influencers who advocate your brand and are more likely to buy from your brand.

Also, to market your niche you need to use influencers. According to a recent survey, a fifth of the consumers from the US have purchased an item based on an influencer.

Study Customer Behavior

Understanding your buyers’ reactions in the market makes your business successful. Knowing your customer behavior plays a vital role in helping you build your customer-centric marketing strategy as you grow your brand.

• Learn how they spend on your business

Consumers have different motives when buying a product or service. Satisfying each motive may increase the intensity of purchase.

• Build a relationship with them to serve effectively

This involves engaging customers in all aspects and creating a rapport that keeps customers coming back.

• Provide value upfront for your customers.

You achieve this by meeting their expectations. Give your customers great services that will compel them to use your brand whenever they need help to solve their challenges.

Ways to measure your customer-centric marketing growth

Customer Lifetime Value

For any customer-centric organization, CLV is the most important. It measures how a customer is going to spend on a product throughout his or her relationship with it.

Churn Rate

This involves tracking the number of customers you are losing. It is a very effective way to alert you that something is not right.

Net Promoter Score

NPS predicts customer loyalty and company growth by asking the question “what is your possibility of recommending our company to a friend or colleague?”

Your target customers are given a score range they can recommend your brand based on different aspects.

Profit Margins/ ROI

Excellent customer service will always bring your customer back as well as share with friends leading to a big impact on your company’s overall return on investment.

Purchase Likelihood and Loyalty

This is determined by the cognitive aspects of satisfaction. If your product or service meets or exceeds highlighted satisfaction goals, there is a likelihood of purchase and loyalty.

Brand Advocacy

By focusing on the needs of consumers, you create strong brand advocacy. According to research by the Harvard Business School, there can be a 200% growth in revenue from a 12% increase in brand advocacy.

Develop a Personal Brand

Your brand differentiates you from your competitors and creates a lasting impression in the mind of your customers and audience.

Be Consistent Across all the Marketing Channels

This ensures you are networking regularly and effectively thus growing your professional circle. It’s a great customer-centric marketing plan to build more trust with your customers.

You get to connect with both peers and leaders on different marketing platforms hence the recognition of your brand. Ensure you use your business logo across all your marketing channels.

Have a Business Logo

This is a representative of your company. While logos are subject to change, you should design one that is attractive and makes sense.

Here is an example of the PayPal business logo.

Conclusion

Although the implementation of customer-centricity may be expensive and complex, it is the secret toward unlocking your true customer value potential.

Learning and implementing a great customer-centric marketing plan will help you grow your brand in a short time.

You will reach more target customers, convert them and make them loyal customers to your brand.