How to Create a Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business

Editorial Staff

May 9, 2022

Customers are at the core of your business’ success. No doubt, it is important to define the financial targets and strive to meet them. But, if you focus on providing a customer-centric service, meeting the targets would be a natural outcome.

Let’s talk about the ways you can approach and improve customer-centric marketing for your small and medium businesses.

What is Customer-Centric Marketing?

Customer-centric marketing is a strategy designed by keeping the customers’ needs first. You can achieve this with a mix of intuition, past customer dealing experience, common sense, performance metrics, and data from a particular customer relationship management system.

It goes beyond knowing your ideal customers. Instead, a customer-centric approach focuses on what’s best for them, be it a service or a product. Once you have this insight, you advertise, sell, and promote your products and services accordingly for a win-win transaction.

4 Tips to Infuse a Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy into Your Company

#1. See everything from the customer’s perspective – While this is obvious, it is easier said than done. The mist of annual targets and excessive familiarity with the industry can make the marketing team myopic towards the products, services, and customer needs. It could be something as simple as aligning all products with the brand image. If you aren’t doing that, your customers may not relate to new products, given that their attention span is not getting any longer.

#2. Don’t annoy your customers – Sleazy marketing tactics that lure customers into clicking on a mail can never replace a genuine email that contributes high value. This could fulfill your short-term metrics of lead generation but will seriously damage the brand’s reputation. It is not about the quantity but the quality of leads.

#3. Use insightful long-term metrics – Without the data from a CRM system, you cannot understand your customers. It would help if you got insights into how well the customers interact with your brand. Remember that existing customers are your free marketing channels who will bring you more business without asking for it.

#4. Offer an amazing experience to your customers – Increasing sales and in-flow of money can create euphoria but do we keep a check on the customer experience we give at every stage of the buyer journey? We should give an amazing experience to all customers, including those who cancel or return the order.

3 Ways You Can Improve Your Customer-Centric Marketing Efforts

There could be numerous ways to improve customer-centric marketing. It depends on the brand and the type of product or service that you offer. However, some universal ones include –

#1. Ease of Navigating your Website:

Your website is perhaps the single most important source which establishes your brand’s image. Some of the questions you should ask yourself about your website are –

• • Is it easy to use, understand and navigate?
  • Does it convey the brand’s message clearly? For example, if your brand has a social or environmental benefit component, does your website highlight that?
  • If your website accepts financial transactions, is it safe? A website with an SSL certificate is secure and is ranked higher by search engines.

#2. Content Marketing:

Customers don’t want to see a website that only focuses on you swiping their credit card, even though selling is your final target. Are you providing valuable information on your website through web pages, vlogs, podcasts, and blogs?

Valuable content is often an overlooked factor but does wonders in passive or pull marketing, where the customers come to you rather than you approaching them.

#3. Customer Support:

Mediocre support will repel the customers and push them to your competitors faster than you think. Have specialist teams handle a subset of inquiries. This will help you handle questions and queries better and leave the customers satisfied.

A customer-centric organization does not cut corners on customer support to save money. Instead, investing in a cost-effective CRM system that integrates with all channels, including website forms, social media, chatbots, and phones, does wonder in achieving sales and marketing targets.

Final Thoughts:

Focus on the customer is an overused but less understood term. It goes beyond traditional methods and genuinely understands your customers’ needs while implementing technology to help you achieve your targets.

Small and medium businesses often struggle with this, given their limited budget. But with a cloud-based CRM system, they can be at par with any large organization in their customer-centric marketing.