A customer-driven marketing strategy refers to a marketing strategy that keeps your customers squarely in the middle of everything you do.
From the early stages right through the end, it’s the only strategy you implement for your business.
That means you understand as much as possible who your customers are, what they want, and their preferences.
You know all about the demographics and interests of your target market, and you take the opportunity to understand them.
As reasonable as it may sound, customer-driven marketing is not the same as customer service. Your main objective is to satisfy your customers and provide exactly what they need, being as flexible as you could for them.
So, in today’s world, which digital marketing strategy is more reliable and sufficient?
The product-centric or customer-driven strategy? Many marketing experts will argue that there are vast distinctions between these two strategies.
In this article, the focus is on the consumer.
So is it all about how you make your customers happy? What can your business do to offer the solution to their problem from arising from a simple customer feedback?
But how do you meet and exceed your customer expectations?
What is Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy?
A customer-focused marketing strategy satisfies customers’ needs uniquely and helps businesses improve Return On Investment (ROI). By recognizing and targeting consumers with a higher customer lifetime value, companies can boost relationships by offering solutions to serve their needs.
Customer-centric businesses ensure that the customer is at the center of a business’s philosophy, operations, or ideas.
A defined driven marketing strategy is the activities of the business, which as its key objective is to meet the customer expectations and needs. This strategy should be concise with the exact guidelines, sales and revenue goals of the brand – by implementing educated assumptions.
According to the five-step model of the marketing process, the first step in marketing is understanding the marketplace and customer needs and wants. As it relates to customers, the aim of marketing is to sense and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits them and sells itself.
Being customer-driven means all your sales, marketing, or support strategy must be organized and planned accordingly.
There are times when a process changes from the products to achieving consumer needs, which results in cultivating customer loyalty and helping expand the customer base (namely new customer acquisition).
Value-Based Marketing
A value-based marketing strategy can help your business achieve substantial trust with customers when you deliver on the promise you make through your campaign. You prove that you practice what you advocate. If your brand relates to your audience, they will willingly connect with you and share it with others. A value-based strategy can help you understand your target audience and keep your followers loyal in the long run.
Business to consumer marketing (B2C) works because customers search for goods and services to meet an immediate need. Therefore, they tend to purchase without doing much thorough market research on the product or services. For a successful B2C marketing strategy, a business owner should understand their customers’ buying habits, trends in the market, and strategies their competitors use.
Just like any other marketing strategies you planned, you’ll need to experiment with the methods you use and ensure your customer engagement and analytics are in check. Always be attentive to the types of strategies and communications that appeal to your audience. Then replicate that approach.
Customer communication is a vital part of this strategy!
Elements of an Effective Value-Based Marketing Strategy
A successful value-based marketing plan is varied and should relate to your target audience at various levels. You have to put the marketing efforts into making sure that each important element added is aligned with those values or else you’ll end up losing your customer’s trust.
To highlight why customer-driven marketing concepts are essential to your business, read below:
Higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
A customer-based marketing strategy incorporates identifying marketing segments and creating programs targeted to specific customers. It helps in providing a unique value concept to the ideal customer.
Increase Customer Base
Owning a value-driven marketing plan assists in offering customers the required value they are looking for. If you thrive in fulfilling your client’s needs in the first attempt, the customer base increases with referral customers and Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM).
Improve Customer Loyalty
Source: National Custom Label
Often loyal customers will regularly purchase from their preferred brands. You can easily connect the customer’s info and use it to create a more robust and enjoyable experience for them and your brand loyalty. By providing great experiences, you’ll expedite revenue and build customer loyalty.
How to Successfully Build a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy?
The ability to understand your customers is essential to ensure the success of a consumer-based strategy. The customer-first approach exceeds the duties of your marketing team. Both your sales and marketing customer service team need to accommodate outstanding customer service and experiences.
Let us go further and elaborate more on creating a customer-driven marketing strategy for your brand.
Step 1: Identify Your Niche and Create Detailed Buyer Personas
The first major step of a marketing strategy is to identify your niche. Of course, if you choose the market-driven strategy approach, your marketing strategy starts well before the product is produced.
You should have full information about your customers. This will let you segment and target customers for your marketing plans. This can be for email marketing campaigns or PPC ads, and your success relies on how extensively you manage to segment your customers by related groups and provide them with what they need.
So, what are the four steps to designing a customer-driven marketing strategy (or rather, buyer personas)?
- Market Segmentation – A plan is used to divide a target audience into smaller and controllable categories. A personalized consumer creates more loyal customer, improve brand recognition and increase company’s profit.
- Market Targeting – is a process of choosing exactly your target market from the whole market. It consists of a group/groups of buyers to whom the company wants to provide or for whom a product is created, price is set, promotion or marketing efforts are catered to, and distribution network is prepared.
- Differentiation – this strategy is a business approach created by offering customers something unique and clear from items their competitors may provide in the market. The key objective of implementing a differentiation strategy is to improve competitive advantage.
- Positioning – this refers to the ability to influence customer’s insight. It lets a company achieve predominant margins regarding a brand or product relative to competitors. The goal of this strategy is to establish the image or identity of a brand based on customer perceptions.
You can also approach your buyer persona by:
- Doing market research on your existing customers by organizing surveys and interviews and collecting their personal information like their email address.
- Study your competitors. Learn about their case studies and find out who’s using their product or services and what is their objective.
Step 2: Know What They Want
Knowing and understanding what your customers need is vital for every business owner. Whether you’re selling directly to individuals or other businesses, once you know their demand, you can use the knowledge to influence new prospects and existing customers that buying from you is in their best interest.
The more you know about your consumers, the more effective your sales and marketing endeavor will be. So it’s well worth finding out the 5 W’s and 1 H:
- Who they are
- What they buy
- Why they buy it
- When they buy
- What they think about you
- How much are they willing to spend
But the question is, how do you get to know all this customer data? Fortunately, there are various easy ways to research and study your customer.
Speak to your customer. One of the best and cost-effective ways to gather information about your customer is to ask them. Get a group from your best customers that are willing to provide valuable customer feedback.
Ask things like how they know about your business and what makes them choose you to solve their problem or what is their buying journey. This is one of the most commonly utilized tactics in zero-cost marketing.
You can use all the answers to create a written or video testimonial and add it to your blog posts, webcasts, whitepapers, or other content marketing strategies.
Formal Research. Formal customer insight market research should comprehend the main obstacles and issues encountered by your potential customers. In addition, just like all marketing research, it should address how information about your business and the buying stage is retrieved.
Keyword Research. Understanding the keywords used by your customers is crucial as it lets you know what they think at the exact moment they have a need.
Further reading: Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO
Step 3: Building Product Strategy to Meet Product-Market Fit
If you were given a choice, which one would you choose? Create a product and find the audience that suits best, or find your customers and develop a product based on the market data you have gathered?
Opting for the second option is more advantageous as the latter is full of risks. Businesses should design their products and services based on their consumer’s needs instead of creating a product that might not be the best for their audience.
Essential tips for designing a successful customer-based marketing strategy:
Source: Trade Marketing Agency
Design a positioning map – create a positioning map according to customer insights of your brand based on your competitors’ products or services.
Highlight your value proposition – fully understand customer needs and address how your products or services serve their needs. Pushing your products or services without a value proposition will not produce any significant results.
Select competitive advantage – develop a product or service that differentiates your business from your competitors.
Step 4: Creating an Omnichannel Customer Engagement Plan
Being omnichannel helps to gain valuable insights into customer interactions and their behavior during the buying process. As a result, businesses and brands with secure omnichannel customer strategies retain customers more than those who only focus on a single channel.
Omnichannel customer engagement allows your customers to connect with your brand through their selected channels by putting together an easy adjustment in the same interaction. It helps improve fulfillment and boost the lifetime value of your customers.
The right tools that provide real-time assistance, for example, live chat or visual tools like video chat for order inquiries or automate your customer support tasks with chatbots to provide 24×7 support for customers with common inquiries.
You may be interested in: Techniques and Strategies for Successful Virtual Marketing
Step 5: Investing in Quality Customer Service
Customer service is the support that you provide for your customers before and after they purchase from you. Delivering fantastic customer services is vital if you want to retain customers and grow your business, as customers often remember the kind of services you provided for them.
Conversely, if your business’s customer service is poor, you will jeopardize your business reputation and lose customers no matter how good your product is.
A customer service-oriented culture is all about focusing on customer’s requirements and needs, valuing them over anything else, and responding to them as soon as possible in an efficient manner. This should not involve your support system alone as it should be implemented throughout your business to build a better brand reputation.
One of the critical elements of customer service is always addressing your customer’s concerns no matter what industry you’re in, and it’s essential to handle those concerns appropriately.
Some of the most important customer service values are optimism, accountability, authenticity, trust, respect, and customer communication. These characteristics will help your business earn the loyalty and trust of your consumers. In addition, people prefer brands that have an image of what they believe. Therefore, having regard to positive values is vital for business as well as good deeds.
How to Measure the Success of Your Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy?
One of the benefits of utilizing a targeted marketing strategy is that a company may be able to have more precise marketing campaigns and have a more accurate understanding of how customers respond to product and service offers.
Below are the five elements of marketing strategies that are customer-driven and how to create customer value:
Element #1
Targeting Your Market
Use marketing research to recognize typical demographic characteristics within your customer base, such as age, gender, occupation, and income level. The more you know about your target customer, the easier it will be to create a strategy that appeals to these features.
For example, targeting by topic is a good strategy if your client wants to drive sales on their website or reach a specific audience.
Element #2
Meeting Customer Needs
A value-driven marketing strategy focuses on fulfilling your customers’ needs and studying how your product or services serve their needs. Having good knowledge of customer needs and wants helps add practical value and level up the overall brand recognition.
In addition, customer satisfaction level provides your business a competitive benefit so you can stay a step ahead in the market!
Element #3
Building Customer Loyalty
Customer-driven marketing helps build your customer loyalty which can result in repeat sales and cross-reference. One technique practiced by many marketers is by implementing a rewards program that allows customers to receive points each time they make a purchase.
At the end of the day, having and implementing a marketing strategy driven by consumers not only make your consumers but also your brand happy when you gain a solid customer base.
Element #4
Using Customer Feedback
The success of a brand lies in consistent and positive customer satisfaction and experience. The most successful technique to provide positive customer service is simply by asking for customer feedback from your supporters.
Find out what they like about your products and how you can improve your services through customer feedback – they may end up being the decisive factor in overturning a business!
Element #5
Gaining Customer Referrals Through Word of Mouth Virality
Generating customer referrals is part of a consumer-driven marketing strategy. First, motivate your existing customers to spread the word about your business to get new customers. Then, exercising a referral program where customers are rewarded with benefits like discounts helps gain customer referrals in no time.
So now that you know how to measure your customer-focused strategy, you need to decide which targeting strategy focuses best on common consumer needs, and tailor-make your business approach to cater to those strategies.
Once target segments are identified, your strategies should involve using a single marketing strategy to reach all customers. The benefit you get from a single marketing strategy is that your business is free to allocate all of its resources to attracting a single and defined type of audience with a specific need. This helps you fulfill customer needs better than your competitors.
Conclusion
Customer-driven marketing is essential to create long-term effective customer relationships. To design a customer driven marketing strategy means helping to develop a solid brand, acquisitive customers, and update you on your customers’ ever-changing wants and needs.
Thus, it’s imperative to focus on delivering a positive customer experience through your products and services and tighten up your value-driven marketing strategy.
If you need help identifying your target audience and are eager to increase your customer-driven marketing strategies, One Search Pro is one click away!
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