When companies tout their customer-centric digital marketing approach, what exactly are they referring to? After all, aren’t all companies focused on their customers? Well, not exactly. While companies understand the importance of their customer relationships, it doesn’t mean every company has a customer-centric inbound marketing strategy. So, does your inbound marketing strategy put the focus on your customer?
A Customer First Approach
A customer-centric inbound marketing strategy means everything you do is geared towards improving the customer experience. It’s all about how you advertise online, how you engage customers online, how you welcome them to your website, how easy your website is to navigate, the ease-of-use of your ordering platforms, and perhaps, most importantly, how well you provide after-sales service.
Companies with a customer-centric inbound marketing strategy gather and enrich their data at every touch-point in order to further improve the customer experience. They make no assumptions about what customers want or why. Their decisions are driven by what the customers do and how they do it. Focus entirely on the customer journey and the sales will surely follow. So, what can you do to ensure you put your customer at the front of your approach to digital marketing?
1. Defining Your Buyer Personas
Understanding who you sell to and why is the single most important factor of success with your inbound marketing strategy. Each of your buyer personas represents a different type of customer, a different kind of decision maker, and a different segment of your customer base. If you’re servicing businesses, then your buyer personas are the business professionals you sell to. Understanding these personas means defining their motivations with respect to the positions they hold, their responsibilities and the criteria by which they decide to reward business.
Don't just focus on the professional payoffs. It's important to understand the personal ones as well. A corporate buyer is rewarded based on shortening vendor lead times, getting faster service and securing lower costs or prices. If they succeed, they have fewer headaches. Engineers or project managers achieve success when they deliver a cost-efficient product on time and within budget. Use these personal and professional payoffs to your advantage across all your digital strategies. Focus on how your product or service removes a source of stress for your buyer persona.
2. Map Your Buyer Journey
Outline every single touch-point for your customer. Define what they must do in order to reach you, ask questions, place an order, receive their order, and whom they call after the sale. Leave nothing out. Mapping out the buyer's journey starts with how you engage and motivate customers to act through your digital marketing strategies. It then continues through the buying process and is further defined by your after-sales service. In fact, the buyer's journey should never really end. Win business and then introduce your customers back into the fold.
Use a process map with parallelograms for inputs and output, rectangles for the process, arrows for process flow, rounded rectangles for starting and delivering an order. Continue the process afterward to include what you do to re-engage your customers.
Focus on the following areas when mapping out your buyer's journey...
A. Define a separate map for each of your buyer personas.
Some buyer personas base decisions on price alone, while others have multiple factors to consider. Mapping out each of their journeys allows you to identify those critical touch-points where different buyer personas need a different approach.
B. Pinpoint areas of your buyer’s journey where you can customize your message to that specific buyer persona.
Think about an engineer’s journey versus that of a corporate buyer. The buyer has a standard specification on products. They want quick answers, a competitive price, and fast service. An engineer is looking for help with design and development. One is motivated by a “me-too” product offering, while the other may want a customized solution or engineered product.
C. Identify touch-points for information gathering: What data mining strategies should you employ?
Again, different personas will provide different information and data at different periods. Knowing this beforehand allows you to create digital strategies that prompt these personas to engage your company so you can gather the data you need and enrich it to improve the customer's experience.
D. Identify the best digital marketing strategies for each touch-point for each of your buyer personas.
Business whitepapers and case studies provide a high-level view of your product and its benefits. They show how other customers have benefited from working with your company. These types of downloads are best served through a digital marketing strategy that caters to specific buyer personas. You may even opt for a separate email campaign for each of your personas at each stage of their journey. Ultimately, it's all about trial and error so be ready to experiment.
E. Define what it takes to win again and again.
Engaging your customers online is about making it easier to be found. Some personas are more tech-savvy than others. Some might only find you on their laptops, while others are always available through their mobile devices. Ultimately, you need to understand how to reach your customers, how to engage them and how to incentivize them to return. Again, this takes time and the willingness to investigate multiple options.
3. Assess, Evaluate Metrics, Improve Your Value and Increase Retention
Companies whose digital marketing strategies are customer-centric are ones that allow their customers to drive their strategies. It’s the customer that determines which strategy works best. Your company simply follows the data. This is a never-ending process, one where you continually tweak your approach based on your customer's real-time feedback.
Each of those aforementioned touch-points are areas where your information and data gathering strategy helps you to improve your value proposition. Use metrics and analytics to define success or failure. You have data emerging from customer-facing discussions and visits and external data emerging from your online initiatives. You have plenty of data sources. Now, you just need to put them to use.
The ultimate goal is to increase your customer retention. The higher your customer retention rate, the more your digital strategies are inline with what your customers want and need. It's a solution built around winning more repeat business and one where you're always improving your buyer's journey. Keep it focused on your customer and your sales will increase.
If you need help coming up with a customer-facing strategy across all your digital strategies, then contact us. We can provide an assessment and help set your company on the road to success.
Written By: David Carpenter
