Finding the best way to appeal to customers is a key goal for many businesses. Sure, you can try different marketing tactics and invest in personalisation technologies, but the real key is to get to know your customers inside and out. This is essential for ensuring that you achieve ROI on your investments and that your messages resonate across multiple marketing channels.
In this article, we'll look at the different approaches to building a marketing team that's truly customer-obsessed. The type of team that’s adept at creating a cohesive brand message and maintaining a consistent tone of voice in marketing materials. We'll also take a look at some inspirational brands that have nailed customer-centric marketing on a global scale. Read on to learn more.
Customer-obsessed marketing teams have a deep understanding of their target audience. They will know their audience's motivations, worries, and what holds them back from purchasing a product or service.
From a B2B marketing perspective, they will understand the structure of a business and know the differences between what an operational lead will want to see in a piece of content versus a CEO. This level of knowledge is essential as research from Deloitte found that 87% of organisations entrust purchasing decisions to those that are closest to the problems they are trying to fix. For example, if you are pitching a product to an operations lead, the marketing collateral should address the solution’s productivity benefits, while a CEO would be more interested in the solution’s capabilities for lowering business costs.
Moreover, consumer-oriented marketing teams will know when more technical details or academic arguments will convince readers to take action, depending on whether the audience is near the top of the marketing funnel or closer to making a buying decision.
Additionally, they’ll be naturals at grabbing a social media scroller's attention and encouraging them to discover more – even if they have never heard of the brand before.
In essence, being customer-obsessed requires careful planning, a hefty amount of customer and industry research and a dash of human empathy.
Developing in-depth audience personas is vital to understanding your customers' needs. These personas should include everything from your ideal buyer's occupation, the publications they read and share, the unique pressures they face in their role and their experience with similar brands and products in your industry.
Comprehensive buyer personas should be the focal point of every piece of marketing output, and they should regularly be updated every time you find out something new about your customers or competitors. Give each persona a name and a checklist to ensure that your team's collateral prioritises customer needs and pain points at all times.
There are many persona-building tools online that are packed with advanced features that enable you to import CRM data and social media accounts, helping your marketing team distil masses of customer insights into highly targeted audience segments.
Customer feedback and reviews give companies the clearest view of what's great and what may be lacking in their offerings. Gathering this information and feeding it back to your marketing team can inspire them to create impactful marketing campaigns.
For example, if you find that many of your customers leave comments such as, 'the product is difficult to use,' that should be your marketers' cue to create a set of user tutorials that will teach customers how to get the best use out of your solutions.
Alternatively, if you find that your brand is attracting a lot of customer service requests, boosting your customer experience provisions through hiring more dedicated support teams or installing on-site chatbots will help you collect more valuable insights to improve services and marketing output continually.
Studies show that acquiring a new customer can be anything from five to 25 times more expensive than encouraging repeat business. Therefore, focusing your marketing team's efforts on building customer loyalty metrics is a vital step in creating a more profitable and customer-obsessed business.
Firstly, make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy from you by streamlining the checkout experience. Personalised emails, on-site product recommendations will also make your value propositions more appealing.
In addition, rewarding customer loyalty through refer-a-friend schemes, loyalty cards and exclusive offers will also provide your marketing team with more customer insights and inspiration for improving the customer experience even further.
Lululemon is obsessed with helping its customers live healthier, more fulfilling lives as evidenced by their line of personal care products and dedicated Lululemon Studio app that provides personalised fitness programmes, clothing discounts and the ability to share the platform benefits with friends.
Shopify helped e-commerce businesses succeed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic by listening to their customers and creating new features like shoppable TikTok ads which make it easier for end customers to shop online. They also demonstrated their commitment to humanising B2B content by ensuring their blog was packed with tutorials and information to help entrepreneurial customers excel in an uncertain economic climate.
ASOS utilises customer data effectively to create highly personalised on-site recommendations and email campaigns for its fashion-obsessed customers. It also has its ASOS Premier service which offers exclusive discounts to subscribers, free delivery and early access to new products.
In summary, developing a customer-obsessed marketing department is crucial, regardless of whether or not you source content in-house or through a specialist content marketing agency.
You can accelerate your company's growth through customer feedback, in-depth persona building, and giving your marketing teams the resources and incentives they need to keep audiences at the forefront of their minds. This process will take a great deal of research experimentation and thorough analysis of what works and what doesn’t. But ultimately, the rewards are worth it.
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