The Switch from About Us to About You

Developing a clearly defined marketing message is more important than many marketers grasp. There are many ways to reach your end consumer, but very few that allow you to stand out from the crowd. Customer-centric marketing is a perfect solution for marketers who want to communicate with their audience without sending messages through every single channel.

What is customer-centric marketing?

Customer-centric marketing is a marketing approach designed around customer needs and interests. It is about prioritizing customers over any other factor, using a blend of intuition, common sense, and collected data about customer behavior.

Many marketers use a one-size-fits-all approach, where their message is streamlined across various channels. This approach leaves no room for customization and doesn’t rely on data or take the customer into account. Common types of one-size-fits-all tactics are billboards, newspaper print advertisements, and non-targeted online advertising.

Customer-centric marketing takes into account the unique behaviors and preferences of target customers. This marketing tactic views its customer base as their greatest long-term investment. Customer-centric marketing focuses on learning more about your customers, aligning to their values, mapping their buyer’s journey, and engaging with them across channels they are currently using.

Ways To Influence Customers

There are many ways to appeal to your customers in your marketing strategy. Based on the data your CRM or ERP collects, you will be able to gauge which strategies are the most effective and which channels they should be delivered on. 

You can move customers further along their buyers journey using tactics like:

• Ethos: An appeal based on authority, credentials, or credibility
• Pathos: An appeal to emotion
• Logos: An appeal to logic
• Humor
• Call to Actions
• Nudges
• Offers and deals
• Functions
• Features
• Quality
• Storytelling
• Fear of Missing Out
• Anticipating Objections
• Choice Architecture
• Signaling Social Status
• Countersignaling

Customer-Centric Marketing Tips

Make Your Mission and Value Proposition Clear

A mission statement is a powerful internal declaration of why your company is in business. Statements take into account your target audience, business goals, impact on the community, and offer a unique value proposition. When crafted with the customer in mind, a mission statement becomes a tool to help your teams align communication around the customer and your brand image.

Align With Goals

Successful companies know it’s important to stay on top of their goals and revisit them often. Companies should set quarterly and annual goals and use them as a guiding light to develop marketing strategies. By using goals on a regular basis, you are able to create consistent ways to move customers further along their buyer’s journey and improve retention rates.

In addition to unique business goals, it is important to align with your customer’s goals. 71% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that align with their own values. Your business should be able to offer solutions to problems customers are currently facing and line up with their values. Using a CRM and ERP, you are able to collect data on consumer behavior, which can assist in your strategic placement and marketing behavior.

By marketing with your customer’s end goals in mind, you offer them a solution they need on the platforms they are already familiar with. In addition to saving time by shortening the buying process, you are able to save advertising dollars because of your strategic advertising placement. 

Understand Your Target Market

A target market is the specific group of people you want to reach with your marketing message. They are the people who are most likely to buy your products or services, and they are united by some common characteristics, like demographics and behaviors. To understand your target market it is important to develop strong buyer personas. 

A buyer persona is a detailed description of your target customer. It’s a document that lists everything from demographic information to hobbies, and from career history to family size, all written as if the persona was a real person. 71% of companies that exceed revenue and lead goals have documented buyer personas.

By creating detailed buyer personas, you have a clearly defined target customer. Knowing them inside and out and including the motivations they have or the problems they are struggling with, allows you to customize your marketing messages to speak directly to them.

How to Create Buyer Personas

• Learn about your customers
• Narrow down the most common details
• Determine how to segment your customers
• Create separate personas
• Create your own buyer persona templates customized for your business

Research Competitor Messaging

A common slip in developing a marketing message is overlooking the importance of researching the competition. Knowing your competition and what they stand for is critical to your success. By monitoring your competition, you are able to learn from their mistakes and create differentiation in the marketplace. While it may not be necessary to keep a constant eye on your competitors, checking up on them once a month is recommended.

Write Like People Talk

Now more than ever, it is important to develop messages that align with the natural way consumers talk. There are many reasons to write in a natural linguistic tone for all your communications. One of the biggest reasons is because messages that lack ethos, pathos, and logos are not as effective as communication that does.

Common Professional Writing Myths

• Jargon makes my business sound professional
• My competitors/companies I aspire to be like use jargon
• Complex terminology is tied up with what we do

Reasons to Rethink Jargon

• Natural language builds trust
• Call to Actions without complicated words perform up to 70% perform better
• Search engines are programmed to work against technical jargon

With the integration of Google BERT, search engine algorithms have become natural language processing (NLP) programmes. Google and other search engines have started eliminating keywords that are complex and focus on catering searches to pages that sound like people speak. By looking at the core term and the words around it, Google is able to train its BERT algorithm to understand the way we naturally structure our language when speaking. For marketers this means that the more technical you write, the harder it will be to rank on a search engine.

Creating a great marketing message isn’t about sounding intelligent but more about how you intelligently convey your brand’s abilities in a way that makes customers take action.

Present Your Solution to the Problem

​If you’ve done your research and truly understand your target market, then you know the problems they face and how your company can assist. A creatively crafted message that articulates the solution to the problem is the key to winning prospects. 

Employ a Different Message for Different Channels

A good marketing strategy consists of a variety of marketing channels, like your website, social media, pay-per-click, SEO, events, and print. While it is important to keep your brand voice consistent throughout channels, that does not mean every channel should get the same message. By using HubSpot, you are able to gauge behavior on various platforms, including your website. Using this information, your team is able to build strategies that differentiate channels from another, while still reaching your target audience.

Consumers need to be spoken to differently on different channels. Email marketing has it’s own language that differs from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Knowing the audience you’re targeting in that channel and developing a unique message that is consistent, yet different, is critical to the success of your overall strategy.

Define Your Brand Personality

To ensure your communication is authentic, create a persona for your brand as if it was a person. Similar to buyer personas, your brand personality allows you to create a marketing message in alignment with your brand’s goals.

Important Questions to Consider

• How would that person talk with customers and potential customers?
• How would they make people feel?

Customer-centric marketing is critical to your inbound marketing success. ManoByte is able to create strategies and content to ensure your message aligns with your brand goals and sets you up for success. Contact one of our Business Growth Consultants today to see how we can help you scale your business.