What does it mean to be customer centric? Recently, we’ve seen this word being flung across books, blogs and social platforms, and we know the gist of it, don’t we? It’s really simple: putting the customer at the center. Most companies adopt a customer-centric approach once they realise that putting their customers first and creating real value for their customers is the best way to secure long-lasting business value.
So, with your customers at the heart of your business, this means that all your business strategies and marketing efforts need to revolve around them. This way, it becomes easier for you to communicate the right message to the right customer at the right time; this is particularly essential for digital marketing.
A consumer-centric approach for digital marketing is geared towards understanding what the consumer wants and how the consumer behaves and then adjusting your strategies accordingly. Luckily, with the advancement of technology and effective marketing tools and platforms at hand, we can communicate with each consumer as an individual.
You need to align your marketing campaigns to ensure an overall great customer experience, from the awareness stage right through to the post purchase stage of the customer journey – and this is where the customer journey map comes in. Find out more about customer journey mapping. Stop giving your customers mediocre experiences with your brand. You have enough data tools to measure and improve every interaction a customer has with your business.
To create a successful online customer experience, you need to divide your customers into different personas, so that you can target different people with different ads, content, etc. Aim for about 5 main personas based on the customers you already have. Thereafter, map the various types of customers’ journeys.
Typical stages of the customer journey are awareness, consideration, purchasing, post-purchase nurturing. For all these stages, it’s critical to stay abreast of digital marketing trends and changes.
Here are a few essential tips that you can use to ensure your digital marketing is customer-centric:
- Keep all your content relevant to your audience; this includes your blogs, videos, images, posts and ads. If your audience feels as though your content is not relevant to them, you will lose their interest. Make sure you are always adding value to your potential customers by providing relevant content.
- Optimise your content for you target audiences across all digital channels and platforms, including PPC ads, Social Media posts, Social Media ads and in APP advertising. Make sure you create optimised content for your different target audience personas to get the best return on investment.
- Incentive goes a long way in gaining and retaining customers. Offer value proposition for those engaging with your brand online. You can offer deals and prizes for your online audiences, getting them to engage with your content more. This way your online audience can advocate your brand for you.
- Personalise your brand to get more customers to engage. You can do this by telling your brand’s story. Showcase your personnel, speak to individuals from your online audience directly and advertise events online that your audience can attend to appear “reachable”.
- Measure and adjust your digital marketing strategies to suit your market. Perhaps email marketing is not getting a good response from your target audience and messaging your potential customers directly is a better way to get conversions; whatever the case may be, make sure you continuously adjust your digital marketing strategy to offer value to your customers.
- Investing in a customer relationship management system is also a great way to potentially increase your sales and retain your customers. By having a tool that enables you to deliver personalised customer experience for improved customer satisfaction, you can target your digital marketing efforts more effectively.
If you’re wanting to create a customer-centric digital marketing strategy, speak to digital marketing professionals today.
