Let’s dig into customer-driven marketing strategy as it’s going to be a year of customers.
To understand if your chosen marketing strategy is the right answer for a successful brand building, answer the following questions:
What’s the most important thing in your business? What’s the one thing your business can’t survive without?
Also, what’s the biggest strength of your business? What are your business goals?
If your business goal is increasing your sales, then you’re not building the base of a business that lasts.
A business does not grow because of its products, a business grows because of its customers – customers that love those products. And any business that realizes this on time can sail the ship to the banks of successful business growth.
What Does Customer-Driven Marketing Mean?
Customers are everything for your brand’s success.
So, when you are into customer-driven marketing, you are focusing more on your customer’s needs and what type of marketing technique can best attract them.
You tend to put your customers at the top of your priority list and the center of your business strategy.
If you have ever noticed, customer-driven marketing is all about building a favorable brand environment and experience for the customers.
This is based on the customer-focused culture and your top aim is to provide a better customer experience.
It is only and only in alignment with your customer’s needs and wants. So, if your customer-driven marketing is successful, you are going to get the attention of your customers.
Moreover, all businesses need to have a business model that fully revolves around customer-centricity. It helps businesses to achieve positive as well as personalized customer experiences.
It also supports your existing customers as well as helps in building a new customer base. So, whenever you are into marketing, never forget to incorporate this aspect.
What is a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy?
A customer-driven marketing strategy that your marketing efforts are aligned with the needs of your customers in a more customized and personalized way. It also helps brands to optimize marketing return on investment.
Moreover, identifying and targeting your ideal audiences helps you gain higher brand value.
It also gives brands a chance to strengthen customer and brand relationships by crafting better solutions for their customers.
This will also help you to fit into your customer’s needs.
With a strong customer-driven marketing strategy, your brand can reap good and efficient benefits of targeting and segmenting customers and offering them the experience they desire.
It also helps brands to gain valuable data which provides a 360-degree view of your customers. I hope with this short and crisp information you have gained some insights into what is a customer-driven marketing strategy.
In short, just remember it is all about your customers.
Importance of Creating a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy
Creating a customer-driven marketing strategy has its own goals and objectives.
If you want to create something meaningful. So with this approach, you act as a strong magnet for new clients and prospects.
Let us understand what is the importance of creating a customer-driven market strategy.
Increases Your Customer Base
It is very obvious that if your approach is defined, you are going to attract more customers than expected. I am telling you that this approach can work wonders for you.
Creating a customer-driven strategy along with the highest possible value helps in providing exact value to your customers. It can exactly be the same as they might be looking for.
Remember, if you succeed in impressing your clients, you can easily multiply your customer base along with referral customers.
Remember, the First impression is the last impression. So, go ahead and hit the target market.
Generates Higher Customer Lifetime Value
Customer-driven marketing includes identifying your ideal audiences and marketing segments.
It also develops programs that are highly targeted by your specific set of customers.
Moreover, it helps you in delivering a unique value proposition to your right customers. All your efforts into this make your customers stick to you for a lifetime.
Helps in Cultivating Customer Loyalty
People always purchase frequently from those brands that top their list.
So an effective idea would be to connect all your customers’ data and utilize it to create an enjoyable and dynamic experience for your customers.
This is the key to serve a delightful experience to boost brand loyalty as well as accelerating revenue. This will help you succeed in your mission.
How to Create a Customer-driven Marketing Strategy? 6 Steps
There are six steps involved in creating a powerful customer-driven marketing strategy.
Step 1) Identify Your Customer-driven Business Goals
Start by asking yourself if your business goals are customer-driven or not.
As your business goal shouldn’t be about how you want to make more products, expand to a newer market, or grow your profits.
All those are the wrong reasons to be in the business.
Your business goal should always be linked to your customer’s goals. You should always be thinking, ‘what else can I do to serve my customers? How can I solve their problems? How can I add value to their lives?’
The moment you will be able to align your business goals with the goals of your customers, you will be able to step up the first ladder of business growth.
Once your business revolves around your customers, sales and profits grow.
Related: 5-point Checklist to setting up SMART Business Growth Goals
Step 2) Turning the Focus of your Marketing Strategy to Your Customers
Once your customer-centered goals are in place, you are ready for the next step which is developing a customer-oriented strategy.
Whatever your marketing and advertising strategies are, rethink those to figure out how can you add more value to your customers’ lives.
Any business decision should have only one purpose which is to make the life of a customer easier. Moreover, it speeds up even your decision-making process.
If any business change will enrich the customer experience, customer satisfaction, or customer relationship, that change is good and should be implemented.
Step 3) Working on Your Customer Experience
As a business owner, always try to give the best customer experience. Every little detail about your business matters.
If you have ignored any area of your business because you found it unimportant, maybe you want to think about that again.
Important to realize, customer experience is not about what you find important, it’s about what your customers find important.
If that small change you were ignoring for so long can add to the satisfaction and delight of your customers, maybe you should consider prioritizing it over all your other business plans.
Your goal should always be to give a superior customer experience. If you think, at the moment, your customers’ emotions are anything lesser than the feeling of delight, you should restrategize.
Step 4) Improving Your Customer Engagement
If you want to excel in customer experience, you have to increase your customer engagement.
The reason for that is when the customer interacts with your brand, it gives you many opportunities to understand better what your customers feel about your offerings.
Not just that, it even helps you in identifying all those business areas that can be improved but they never caught your attention.
Another point to remember, improved customer engagement leads to innovation.
And innovation is one of the crucial factors for achieving unbelievable long-term business growth.
Customer engagement marketing is the new way of marketing that focuses on building customer relations and improving customer retention.
Related: How to Create a Customer Engagement Marketing Strategy?
Step 5) Improve Customer Satisfaction
Customer engagement helps you give a better customer experience. And better customer experience and positive customer engagement lead to customer satisfaction.
That’s why customer-oriented marketing doesn’t focus on spamming and manipulating a customer into buying your products. It focuses on customer satisfaction.
Cheap marketing tactics can help you make a sale to a customer one time. But continuous sales to the same customer comes from customer trust and customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is one of the most useful ways of increasing your profits and running a successful business.
It’s much profitable to make sales to the same customer, than to keep looking for new ones all the time.
Customer satisfaction will bring customer loyalty, which will bring repeat purchases along with long-term growth.
Step 6) Build Customer Relationships
The Internet has completely changed the way we run a business? Before the internet, a brand was just a brand – lifeless and unapproachable. At that time, it was tough for a brand to interact with its customers.
It limited its communication with its consumers through TV ads, radio ads, pamphlets, banners, and direct mails.
But, none of those channels provided a means for two-way communication.
But the internet changed that scenario completely. It provided all those customers a platform where they can express how they feel about a product.
From the era of one-way communication, we entered the era of two-way communication.
To point out, two-way communication doesn’t happen between a brand and a human, but it happens between a human and a human. So, with this realization, brands started becoming more and more human every day.
Your brand builds a stronger relationship when you give a chance to your customers to share their side of stories.
As a result, this leads to the process of customer relationship building and customer relationship management.
7 Expert Tips for Creating a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy
Understanding your audiences can be a tricky play in your business strategy especially when it is consumer-based. You need to place yourself in a way that your brand stays in their mind for a longer duration.
Your team should understand how to provide excellent services to your customers that will enhance their experience.
So, let us discuss some attributes of developing an effective customer-driven marketing strategy.
Identify Your Target Audiences
A customer-driven marketing strategy requires you to focus on identifying your target market and target customers.
It also helps you to create a relevant buyer persona to personalize your marketing efforts.
Maximum companies who exceed their sales and revenue goals are consistently aiming to maintain their buyer personas. It adds great value to your brand.
You can also go with data-driven research to understand all about your target audiences and what all motivates them to purchase your products and services. This will also help in improving your customer experiences.
Go With Segmenting Your Target Audiences
Identification is one thing and segmenting is one thing. When you segment your audiences, it gives you a broader and defined picture of your target audiences. It enhances your vision to view your audiences.
Moreover, talking about the digital area, segmentation makes your customers more empowered than ever. Their purchasing decisions are altered quickly.
So, brands need to understand them to catch them. You just need to understand the way your segmented audience thinks and behaves.
For instance, you can create tailored marketing techniques to match your products and services offerings to the needs of your customers.
Build Your Product Strategy
Product strategy is very necessary to move in a proper direction to attract your target customers. Focus on customers needs to build a powerful product strategy.
For instance, if you are given two options like-
-
- Firstly, creating a product and finding target audiences or
- Finding your right audience and designing your product.
Which option will you go 1 or 2? Now you need to decide here.
Choosing the second option will be highly effective for your brand’s success. Your brand should always design a strategy that revolves around your customers’ needs. I hope this simple example made things clearer for you.
Create a Relevant Customer Engagement Plan
Today’s age customers expect brands to deliver an experience that is far beyond the only purchase of products.
For a successful customer-driven marketing strategy, go by creating an omnichannel customer engagement plan.
This type of plan helps you to gain valuable insights into your target customers and also their behavior.
It also empowers your customers to connect with your brand through preferred channels enabling better understanding.
For instance, you can provide real-time assistance to your customers with live chat or video chat and deliver fast solutions.
Invest in Customer Service Experience
In a customer-driven marketing strategy, taking care of your customers is all that matters. Here, customer service is an integral part.
Customers always remember your brand by the service you provide. So, properly structure your customer experience strategy. Do not take any chance to disappoint them.
For instance, you can provide customer support with chatbots and provide 24/7 support to their queries.
Take Account of Your Customers Feedback
A vital tip to create an effective customer-driven marketing strategy is customer feedback.
Positive customer experience along with feedback helps you in building a better brand reputation.
Moreover, implementing customer feedback will also help you in creating better products and services. It gives your customers a feeling that you value them and listen to their opinions.
This also helps you in building trust and loyalty.
Do Word of Mouth Marketing
Increasing your customer base with word-of-mouth marketing can be a part of your customer-driven marketing strategy.
It helps you in encouraging a loyal customer base and also sharing positive experiences as well as success stories.
This further helps in attracting new customers. Remember, when a brand’s marketing strategy is customer-driven, it always has a positive impact on your customer base.
For instance, you can implement a referral program where you reward your customers for sending new business in your way. You can reward them with discounts, cash rewards, or free subscriptions.
Customer-driven Marketing Example: Amazon
The brand that comes first to my mind when thinking about customer-driven marketing is Amazon.
Amazon built $1 Trillion worth of empire (MarketWatch, Feb 2020) by using customer-driven marketing.
Jeff’s entire marketing strategy was based on improving customer value and relationships. Finally, it paid off. Within 2 years of their launch, their net worth skyrocketed to $150 million.
So to improve customer experience, Amazon has never shied away from taking risks. This led to many cool innovations and ultimately, getting the majority of the market share.
Amazon made sure that its customers feel important and valued. And it made its customers the most important element of its business.
Moreover, it was the first one that provided the personalized experience to every shopper based on their browsing histories and provided the list of similar products based on their past purchases.
Also, because of its business goal to provide a better customer experience, it led Amazon to listen to its customers and innovate. This led to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Amazon just focused on its customers; market share and profits followed that.
Key Takeaway: Customer-driven Marketing Strategy
Your business exists because of your customers, not because of your product.
All things considered, you should move from product-driven marketing to customer-driven marketing.
Customer-driven marketing leads to better customer engagement, customer relationships, and customer satisfaction.
As a result, the Customer churn rate goes down considerably and customer loyalty builds up.
We are here to help you adopt a customer-driven marketing strategy for your business. To learn more about how can it make a difference to your business, contact us.
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