What is Customer-Centric Marketing
Customer-centric marketing is an advertising and messaging strategy focused on addressing both customer pain points and customer aspirations. When executed correctly, customer-centric marketing makes current and potential customers feel heard and prioritized through messaging and cadences created through customer research, industry understanding, and solid data about customer behavior.
The Importance of Customer-Centric Marketing
Customer-centric marketing not only provides the optimal experience for potential and current customers, it also allows marketers to learn from customers. With the right technologies, data about customer behavior and ideal customer profiles reveals itself. Companies can discern critical information about who their best customers are, what they are searching for, and what they want from your products or solutions.
Get to Know Your Customers
Organizations today must meet their customers where they are – to get in front of the right people with the right message at the right time. Customers’ needs and wants, and even their online behavior, is always changing. To get your message out on the right channel to the right customer is impossible without real-time customer profiles, made possible by Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).
Creating real-time customer profiles for your customer-centric marketing strategy must include information about your customers from multiple channels. Your customers are interacting with content on many different channels and their behavior on each channel can differ. Companies need insight into what customers are doing across more than just mobile and desktop channels, for example; they need to be able to leverage customer insights across multiple touchpoints in real time to inform how to most successfully engage with their customers. Tangible omnichannel touchpoints are made possible with a holistic view of customer data and by extension real-time customer profiles.
Real-time customer profiles provide a host of benefits in the moment and over the long term:
Deeply Understand Customers
- Combine all customer data—internal and external; behavioral, demographic, financial, geographic, operational, psychographic, transactional—into a distinctive customer profile
- Gain a holistic view of individual customers
- Keep current on customers and their changing needs and preferences
- Continuously identify customers’ value over time and respond accordingly
Uniquely Personalize the Customer Experience
- Build more relevant and engaging customer journeys
- Personalize experiences at each touchpoint throughout the journey
- Unify the customer experience across channels
- Use your deep understanding of customers’ current and potential future value when you reach out to them with communications and offers
- Improve conversion rates
- Eliminate waste chasing the wrong customers or interacting at the wrong time or in the wrong channel
Quickly Access Comprehensive Customer Data
- Connect internal and external, online and offline, and first-party, second-party, and third-party data in real time to create a unique, robust view of each customer
- Ensure that customer profiles are always current and correct
- Identify prospects most likely to become high-value customers
- Better predict what new products/services are most likely to launch successfully
- Imagine taking every benefit of a standard, static customer profile and revving it up with real-time insight. Everything from product development and positioning strategies to prospecting and loyalty schemes is enriched with real-time insights. As a result, you deliver more value to customers and they, in turn, become more valuable to your business.
Customer-Centric Marketing In Action
There are many benefits to customer-centric marketing.
For example, use automated machine learning to identify at-risk customers with low engagement, negative feedback, or withdrawn funds from key accounts and quickly stage the offers most likely to prevent attrition. These offers can be deployed in outbound or inbound channels, social media or even anonymous ad targeting to present offers for stimulation, re-engagement and renewal.
Reward positive customer behavior like loyalty and repeat interaction, or otherwise provide positive incentives for customers who hold negative sentiments towards your brand. Respond to customer behavior quickly, effectively, and relevantly. Create a brand community through reminders to members and customers of the important events, tasks and milestones that impact their financial, health or lifestyle goals.
Drive up-sell, cross-sell and add-ons by using customer events and triggers to identify the most beneficial or most likely next product for your customer. Pinpoint the products and services that have the highest conversion rates for prospects and customers, and the optimal messages, timing and channel for each customer.
Customer-centric marketing is equally as critical for winning new customers. Build a buyer journey by presenting highly relevant offers, messages and calls to action to convert anonymous or known prospects to new customers. Build your most optimal customer profile from behavioral, demographic, and geographic data and act on the profile of your next loyal customers.
