Using Customer-Centric Marketing Strategies to Find What Your Customers Want

In this digital age, the customer is more in control than ever before. They have so many ways to find exactly what they want that it's imperative that you have a clear picture of what that is and make sure they know you have it. This is why adopting a customer-centric culture has become a sound strategy for both finding and retaining customers. By putting the customer and their needs at the center of everything you do, you are sure to deliver the kind of value that today's digital savvy customers look for.

In a previous post, we talked about how you can create a customer-centric marketing strategy by augmenting and slicing your database. Now, let's look at how you can use your strategies to discover what your customers want. Part of putting the customer at the center of everything you do, is collecting as much data as you can on your customers. With this data, you can create a 360-degree view of your customer and understand their motivations, desires, interests, buying behaviors and more. using this information you can piece together what they want and what moves them to purchase. If you don't have enough data, you may need to develop further data gathering tools: research, surveys, polls, social media monitoring, focus groups or even just purchasing the data from another source.

Another way to be customer-centric and find out what your customer wants is to listen and respond to your customers on a regular basis. By listening to, analyzing and taking action on any customer feedback you get, you can find out what they really like, what they don't like and where changes need to be made. You can quickly discover any issues they may be having and find the root cause of their displeasure – even if it's a minor thing – and change those offerings to what would make them happy. You can also monitor how well you're doing at delivering what they want through this feedback loop.

Not every customer is going to want the same thing. Different strategies will yield different results. For instance, you may want to take your best customers and see if there are opportunities to create new products of services that will not only make them happier but increase sales to them. Or you might want to look at the lifetime value of each customer and find where their are opportunities to keep them coming back and provide different offerings at each stage of their life cycle. These may be things you already offer, but by knowing where they are in their life and buying cycles, you can market the right things to them at the right time.

Once you have discovered what your customers want, make sure you disseminate the information throughout your organization. Every department and customer touch point should know this information. Those who interact with customers can change their approach based on the information, making sure the customer knows you have it, Those developing or purchasing your products can keep those needs in mind to make sure you have more of the right mix to keep customers coming back for more.

Creating a customer-centric culture that really works for your company means making sure everyone is on the same page, delivering what your customer wants, when they want it and how they want it. Do that you'll not only have happy customers, you'll have a healthy bottom line. And if you want to know how to connect with those customers, we have a post that gives you 24 ways to do it.

Mike McClure, hopefully giving you what you want.