Customer Focused Marketing
As we’re approaching another new year, 2024, it makes sense that a lot of us as businesses are starting to re-examine our marketing departments and the decisions being made there. Constant improvement is just one of many facets that we should be paying attention to. How can we strive to improve, then?
One option is to go for something known as customer focused marketing. Let’s take a moment to examine it on a basic level, though we’ll be covering it in further detail throughout this article today of course.
Customer-focused marketing, also referred to as customer-centric marketing, is an approach to marketing that places the needs, preferences, and satisfaction of the customer at the center of all marketing efforts. It involves understanding and meeting the specific needs and wants of the target customers in order to create and deliver superior value to them. You can get a further primer on the topic here: https://hbr.org/sponsored/2021/08/a-5-step-roadmap-for-becoming-a-more-customer-centric-company
Stick around if you want to learn more about it and the applications it has in business. There are a lot of them of course, so bear with us as we discuss them as well as how you can incorporate these strategies in the real world – after all, that’s probably the most important thing to keep in mind here.
What is Customer Focused Marketing at its Core?
As we hinted at above, there’s a lot of ground to cover as far as customer-focused marketing goes. For now, let’s take a look at some of the key pillars of how it’s intended to work.
In customer-focused marketing, the entire marketing strategy and execution are aligned towards building strong and long-term customer relationships. It involves various activities such as market research, segmentation, targeting, positioning, product development, pricing, communication, and customer service, all with the aim of delivering maximum customer satisfaction. That way, you can start to inspire some form of brand loyalty in your consumer base, and they’ll keep buying from you for a long time to come.
What are the principles of customer focused marketing, then? Organizations such as Magnetic Marketing can explain it in depth, so consider checking out the resources that are out there as well.
Customer Understanding
Perhaps the most important pillar is this one: understanding our customers on several levels. It refers to gaining a deep understanding of customers’ needs, desires, preferences, and behaviors. Typically, this means that it will involve gathering data, conducting research, and analyzing customer insights to develop a comprehensive understanding of the target audience.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it than just that. In fact, you’ll want to be familiar with terms like demographics, psychographics, customer needs and pain points, customer buying behaviors, and the feedback that you’ll be getting. Do your best to familiarize yourself with all of that, and don’t be afraid to utilize external resources if this is out of your wheelhouse.
Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation is a marketing strategy that involves dividing a market into distinct groups or segments based on specific characteristics, needs, and behaviors of the customers within that market. The purpose of segmentation is to identify and target the most relevant and profitable customer segments for a given product or service. Typically, this is where we find that the concept of “target audience” becomes particularly relevant.
By understanding the unique needs and preferences of each customer segment, businesses can develop targeted marketing strategies, product offerings, pricing strategies, and communication campaigns that resonate with each segment. This approach allows companies to deliver more personalized experiences, improve customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive revenue and growth – all of which are critical to success, especially as we approach a new year.
Customer Value Proposition
Typically, this concept is referred to as “CVP,” if you’ve ever heard that phrase. Essentially, it’s the way that a business convinces customers that their product has inherent value.
Usually, it is a statement or explanation of the key value that a product or service offers to solve a customer’s problem, meet their needs, or fulfill their desires better than competing alternatives.A well-defined and compelling customer value proposition communicates the reasons why customers should choose a particular product or brand over others in the market. It identifies the specific benefits, advantages, and outcomes customers can expect to gain by choosing a particular product or service, therefore inspiring the brand loyalty that we mentioned previously.
Customer Experience
Naturally, the experience of our customers is something that we should be quite focused on. As you can read about in articles like this one, it’s one of the most important parts of implementing a customer focused marketing strategy in the first place. What do we need to know about it, then?
Customer experience in marketing refers to the overall perception and impression that customers have of a brand as a result of their interactions and engagements with it throughout their customer journey. It encompasses all touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a business, including pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages.
Customer experience in marketing focuses on delivering a positive, memorable, and satisfying experience that exceeds customer expectations. It also involves understanding customer needs, preferences, and desires and aligning marketing strategies and activities to meet those expectations. What steps along the way should we be familiar with?
The main ones are as follows:touchpoints, creating a seamless experience, personalization, creating an emotional connection, accessibility and convenience, consistency, and post-purchase support. Certainly, this can get a bit confusing, so don’t hesitate to utilize the resources we’ve provided or to do your own research to get an idea of how this works on a deeper level.
Implementation
On a final note for today, let’s take a look at how implementation of these strategies might work. Often, businesses bring in an outside organization to assist with this, especially if they don’t have a dedicated marketing department already.
Perhaps the most important facet is that of continuous self-improvement. The implementation will take plenty of time and strategy, and you should always be finding ways to improve upon it as time goes on!
