No matter your particular industry, product, or service, there’s no doubt that your customers are the lifeblood of your business.
Without them, it wouldn’t survive. Not only that, but it would have no meaning or purpose.
It makes sense, then, that your customers would, and should, lie at the heart of every marketing campaign. All too often, however, marketing strategies are often defined less by what customers want to hear than by what companies want to tell them. That’s a problem because if your target audience doesn’t find your message relevant or meaningful, they’re not going to give you their time, interest—or money.
So how do you create a customer-first marketing campaign that gets results?
By far the first and most important strategy for designing a customer-first marketing initiative is to understand exactly who it is you want to talk to. This may sound obvious, but it’s a bit more complicated than it may at first seem.
Specifically, you’re not only going to need data, but you’re also going to need to know how to use it. Optimizing your market research will likely involve incorporating some pretty sophisticated technologies.
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, for instance, can parse billions of data points. Just as importantly, these systems can translate this data into actionable information, thus ensuring that your decision-making processes are both more efficient and more effective than ever before.
In other words, through technology-driven market data collection and analysis, you will be more equipped than ever before to devise evidence-based, customer-focused marketing strategies.
If you want to craft a truly customer-focused marketing campaign, then you’re going to need to “go” where your market is. Now, more than ever, that means going online. Indeed, research has shown that consumers today both want and expect to be able to communicate and interact online with the companies they support.
Building a robust digital presence provides a forum for connecting with customers and learning about their needs. Additionally, if you play your cards right, your online platforms can function as a form of customer-first marketing in and of themselves.
For instance, you can use your social media pages and your company website to invite customers to share their stories and to post photos and videos of their lives and, in particular, of their experiences with your products and services. You can even host online promotional events and happenings. All of these can serve as profoundly effective marketing campaigns that don’t just put the customer first but that uphold them as the star of the whole show.
One of the best ways to lose your audience is to make them feel unheard or disrespected. Even when you don’t intend it, it’s not hard to alienate your audience in this way if you fail to tailor your messaging strategies to your customers’ needs and expectations.
For example, today’s audiences often have far shorter attention spans than was true of previous generations. Not only are we living in a culture that moves at breakneck speed, but we are also drowning in informational content. We have little time, energy, or cognitive resources to expend on long, complex messaging.
That means that if you want your audience to hear you, you need to deliver your content in short, digestible chunks.
After all, your target audience is more likely to click on a video, image, or text that they can absorb in a single, short encounter, often on their mobile device and often while between tasks or on a work or study break.
Additionally, using content curation will ensure that your target audience receives only the messages that matter to them. Thus, you’re not wasting their time or energy by showing them material that has no relationship to their needs or interests.
It’s not just the logistics that make a brief message more attractive for today’s audiences. When you take the time to craft such content, you are also tacitly telegraphing to your audience that you understand them and respect their needs.
If you can get this most vital of messages across to your audience, then you’re going to have a better chance of engaging them in general. Once you’ve engaged them, you have, in essence, created a de facto marketing laboratory, an ever-ready focus group of engaged customers who can provide real-time feedback on what is working well (and what isn’t) with your product, your service, and your messaging.
Business is all about the customer. So, too, is marketing. However, it takes time, commitment, and strategy to craft customer-first marketing campaigns. The good news is that such efforts will more than pay off in customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. The key is to understand who your customer is through the use of data analytics and to tailor your messaging strategies accordingly.