Today, we want to dive into one of the most common buzzwords in digital marketing today: customer-centric. What is it, why does it matter and why should you consider infusing this approach into your marketing?
What is customer-centric?
It’s a difference of campaigns vs customers. Marketers have traditionally focused on campaigns and the outcomes they can achieve through them. In customer-centric marketing, you focus on customer behaviors, experiences and needs. Does this mean you stop focusing on your outcomes to make it all about the customer? Of course not. The idea is that through better delighting customers first, you will ultimately get even better outcomes for your business.
Why should you be customer-centric?
By moving to a customer-centric approach, you will increase customer satisfaction because you are delivering marketing based on their needs and wants. You will also likely decrease costs because you won't be wasting spend delivering ads to customers who don't want to purchase what you're offering them, while increasing revenue by doing what a customer actually needs you to do to be compelled to purchase.
How do you "do" customer-centric marketing?
It all starts with data, particularly generating actionable insights and activating against signals that your customers provide. You need to market to an individual, which means you need to know who they are across devices. First, you must aggregate and activate against all of your customer inputs across all your data—that means first-, second- and third-party—to give you a single view of your customer. This can be non-marketing data like signing up for loyalty programs in addition to marketing data.
Next, you’ll want to make decisions based on this data and also contextual inputs, from creatives through to channels. All your choices should be oriented towards the customer, not the campaign, such as sequential messaging, which strives to tell a cohesive story regardless of channel to an individual so you influence their needs in real-time. It goes without saying that to do this, you’ll need to think in an omnichannel way rather than channel silos.
After you’ve done this foundational work, you’ll want to ensure all customer interactions are integrated, optimized through solutions such as dynamic creative and measured in as close to a multi-touch measurement model as possible so you properly track all the activities on the path to purchase.
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