THE IMPORTANCE OF CUSTOMER CENTRIC MARKETING

Dear Moleskine Diary,
As I write in you with my easy glide Bic biro pen, I reflect upon my day.

I awoke to the incessant beeping of my Phillips alarm clock with a big display for easy viewing of the time.
Turned on my convenient and intuitive Nespresso coffee machine.
Washed my hair with my Tresemme’ shampoo and conditioner to achieve that salon-fresh feel.
Treated myself to a Helga’s café style toast with Cottee’s Raspberry jam that contains no added flavours or colours.
Drove my Mazda2 that combines impressive fuel efficiency with un-compromised engine power to work.
Turned on my powerful Apple iMac Pro and began my day reading the news online featuring pop up display ads from The Iconic, Australia’s best online fashion and footwear store and iSelect, who make comparing private health insurance in Australia simple… 

We Marketers need to get over ourselves!

No one talks or even thinks like this as they interact with brands throughout their everyday lives. As much as a brand would like to think they are a major part of their customers’ daily thoughts, they are not. To tell you the truth, customers are just not that into you.

However, brands don’t need to take this personally, your brand may not be the centre of your customers world, yet your customer should be the centre of yours.

What is a customer centric approach?

Being customer centric requires your customer to be the starting point for every action, process and every line of thought. It means making marketing decisions to ensure your customers have an authentic experience as a non negotiable - the ultimate benefits being profit growth and competitive advantage through customer acquisition and referring new customers.

At its core customer centricity is about being authentic - no half truths and defining a customer experience from the very beginning that is the best you can sincerely deliver. The goal is to embed this customer experience right across the sales journey - through the attract and awareness stage, right through to the closing of the sale and even continuing through to post purchase and the 'delight' stage. 

Learn more about how to generate sustained growth with B2B Marketing

Why is customer centricity important?

Being customer centric is vital in today’s social sharing world. If you have an unhappy customer, no longer will they just tell their 6 friends, but potentially, their entire social network. And it's much easier to switch to competitors than ever before. The power of a Customer Centric approach is evidenced by the research from  Deloitte that found that companies the followed a customer centric approach were 60% more profitable than counterpart companies.

Additionally, through better understanding our customers, we can practice better brand management by tapping into already strong, salient memory structures, thus strengthening our brand influence. In Byron’s Sharp’s book How Brands Grow, this concept is further explained as the concept of mental availability as the probability that the buyer will notice, recognise and think of a brand in a buying situation.

Customer centricity helps brands climb this ladder of mental availability and compete for the top space of a customer’s mind in the moment of a buying decision.

Take the Financial Services sector for example, we can directly see the results of a profit focus instead of a customer centred approach from the findings of the Banking Royal Commission.
Read our latest research and uncover the opportunities born out of the royal commission and customer centricity.

Customer Centricity and CRM 

By combining the customer centric approach with your CRM software, you can collect a wealth of data around buyer behaviour, engagement and interests. You can also identify the pain points and create opportunities around products and services to provide for your best customers. Ultimately, you will understand the customer experience and learn how to enhance it, improving customer satisfaction, retention and profitability.

The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos once said that … “It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” Amazon encompasses customer centricity by delivering flawless customer experience from every staff member, from warehouse workers, to software engineers to executives. Even the company mission statement begins with to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” What may have started out as an online book store has developed into an ecommerce empire selling products and services, anything that answers the needs of their consumers.

As identified in the CMO Show podcast with Joe Pulizzzi, the godfather of content marketing, this is not a breakthrough business model but a breakthrough in how you define your business and how you build and listen to your audience. Using content marketing as a way to understand pain and gain points you are able to supply your audience with what they are wanting to buy.

This leads us on to the important question, how do you become more customer centric?

How to become more customer centric

Today, businesses are competing with those who have the best relationships with their customers. So how do you ensure your focus really is on the customer? 

Promote Customer Centricity throughout the entire company
Ensure every employee is involved in the happiness of customers. That they understand where the customer touch points are and are each responsible for improving the experiences. Make it visible by ensuring values, mission statements and reminders are around the office. Where possible, consider making delivery of customer satisfaction metrics into employee KPI’s.

Define your customer
Build buyer personas based on real conversations and interactions with customers. They do not need to be overly complicated. Just enough for you to have a picture and story around the persona which can be easily understood and remembered by staff. If you are looking for help in creating a buyer persona read our blog Expert Advice on Building Buyer Personas or download our template How to Create Buyer Personas.

Understand the customer journey
Map out the interactions a person has with your company both on the path to purchase and after they have become a customer. How do they find you? What is their decision process like? Ensure you understand their experience and then work on continuously improving it. If you are looking for help in creating a buyer’s journey, read our blog Improving Customer Leads with a Buyer's Journey.

Listen to your customers
By listening to customers through interactions and touch points we begin to understand their needs and what their motivations are. Together with the customer demographic and behaviour information, you can begin to meaningfully segment your market and better tailor experiences to address the anticipates reactions of your customers. Ultimately you can create a better picture to place at the core of business practices.

Use content
Once you have a solid understanding of your customer you can use content to attract and retain them throughout their interaction with your brand. Understanding their needs and pain points will be the influence of your content strategy. As explained by Joe Pulizzi, content can become a profit centre when you truly understand the needs of your customers, allowing you to do more than just sell products, but build an audience.

Creating a customer centric culture starts with your company values and allowing the customer to be at the core of every decision. How Customer Centric would you say your business is? Which areas would you find difficult to implement? Talk to us.

For the buyer persona templates and a detailed guide to building your own personas, download our eBook How to Create Buyer Personas.