How to Create a Customer-Focused Marketing Strategy
Staying competitive in any industry requires a strategy that revolves around customers. When things aren’t working or you’re not hitting your monthly targets, chances are you’re not listening to your clients.
Creating a strategy that’s tailor-made for your audience is a lot easier than most business owners think. Using social media, apps, and other online platforms, you can engage, access, and directly converse with website visitors and clients. Below, I’ll outline tips on how to gather and extract the information you need to formulate a powerful customer-focused strategy.
Customer Segmentation
Not all customers think the same way or live the same lifestyle. So, you shouldn’t rely on a one-size-fits-all strategy for acquiring new clients. Customer segmentation deals with pinpointing set groups when formulating an effective marketing strategy. This can range from broad groupings such as age or gender to spending habits, food preferences, or hobbies.
Customer segmentation starts with coming up with different ways to classify your audience. The best way to do this is by creating multiple customer profiles, or personas, and enumerating their common variables. Using the newly segmented groups, test the effectiveness of your classification through A/B testing. Send out segmented messages, emails, or redirect visitors to personalized landing pages to see if your new strategy is worth turning into a full-blown campaign.
Hangout with Your Customers on Social Media
Gathering feedback is one of the best ways to create a customer-focused competitive strategy. This is because you’re communicating with your customers directly. Talking to your sales team or the marketing department about how they interact with clients can be biased or one-sided. Don't get me wrong, the information your team provides is useful, but for a customer-driven strategy, you need to put more emphasis on your clients.
Social media platforms are a great way to gather feedback. If you have an active business page, you can scan through the comments and get an idea of how customers interact with your products or services; this is how to practice active listening on social media. If you don’t have a well-established online presence, be sure to read “Which Social Networks Are Absolutely Necessary for Businesses?”
After learning how to listen to your audience, create a series of questions that focuses on the pain points of the sales or conversion process. Examples of common pain points include unreliable customer service, complex product descriptions, and high prices.
After creating a set of questions, it’s time to start interacting with your customers. Start conversations with individuals who reply to your posts or message them privately online. As tempting as it might be, don’t go through each question like an online survey; instead, interact with each customer in a casual way. This helps humanize your brand.
Send Out Engaging Online Surveys
Online surveys are mostly used for measuring the effectiveness of a product or marketing campaign. Surveys are fast and efficient because they don’t require direct interaction. In most cases, online surveys are deployed with email campaigns or serve as a prerequisite before an incentive (downloadable content, unlocking featured articles).
However, using online surveys to gather data for your customer-focused strategy only works if you’ve been actively acquiring leads. Therefore, if you don’t have a healthy amount of email subscribers, work on building your list first. For help with that, read “How to Grow Your Business with Email List Building.”
Best practices for online surveys include the following:
- Keep the number of questions under 10
- Use easy-to-answer formats (rating, multiple choice, checkbox)
- Avoid misleading questions
- Send out your survey in the morning for maximum response rates
Revisit Your Long-Tail Keyword Strategy
When it comes to SEO, keyword trends are essential for creating a customer-focused strategy because they highlight how your customers think. Furthermore, proper keyword research is essential for staying relevant on Google. Long-tail keywords are specific phrases that customers use to find your website, product, or service in search engines. Compared to short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords are closely linked to higher conversions and deeper engagement.
There are several ways to revisit your long-tail keyword strategy, but my favorite way is by using a keyword research tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner. For help conducting keyword research, be sure to read:
Doing this type of research will help you uncover the following information:
- Which long-tail keywords are not being used
- Which phrases you should be focusing on
- New long-tail keywords that have emerged due to trends
- How your customers have evolved when they think about your product
Use Trends Research Tools to Your Advantage
In order to stay relevant in the eyes of your customers and the industry, you need to stay updated on industry trends. The problem for most business owners is that they don’t have time to read every blog post, tweet, or article that breaks industry news. Trends research is important when creating a customer-focused strategy because it can give you a better idea of what your customers care about, what they like, what frustrates them, and where they think the industry is going.
Trends research tools include apps or online platforms that focus on specific industries, leaders, websites, or companies. Google Alerts and Google trends are my favorite tools for trends research.
Conclusion
A customer-focused strategy can revive your business goals and set you in the right direction toward consistent growth. Don’t forget to renew your strategy after a set period of time in order to stay fresh and relevant.
How is your business strategy tailored for your customers? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
