How to Build an Effective Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy
Today, the entire business landscape is choked by innumerable products vying against each other for customers. Therefore, holding customers’ attention has become imperative to ensure success and profitability.
However, the strategy of reaching out to the customer based solely on your product offerings has become outdated.
You need to consider customer experience in the mix as well.
Just like there are two facets of business offerings—product and experience, there are two ways of marketing them to reach out to potential customers.
These are called product-driven marketing and customer-driven marketing.
While they might seem similar if viewed from a superficial level, experts would point out the clear distinction between the two concepts and how important it is to evaluate your offering's synergy with these strategies.
Customer-driven versus product-driven
A product-driven strategy involves the business that focuses on designing the product before reaching out to the customers. Such strategies are driven under the assumption that great products would attract great customers.
In this approach, business operations revolve around the product and its manufacturing. The marketing team further takes the product to market and build customer relations, purely on the merits of the product.
In contrast, customer-driven strategies focus on understanding the customer and shaping the product based on the information gathered. Thus, these strategies are based on the assumption that customer satisfaction is necessary for profitability.
In such operations, extensive effort is directed towards gathering customer insights. The product is designed according to the needs of the customer, creating a ready market of its own in the process.
The Apple versus Samsung case
To highlight the differences in the two approaches, let us try to understand these models through real-life examples.
The product-driven approach is best exemplified by Apple. The brains behind Apple revolutionised the tech market and carved out its niche by introducing distinctive products at a time when no one even felt the requirement of such products.
They simply believed that their products would garner a market of their own, without necessarily going out to discover one. The status attained by Apple proves the success of its product-based approach.
At the same time, Apple's competitor in the smartphone market, Samsung is a well-known example of a customer-driven approach.
Samsung has been known for utilising most of its resources towards understanding its customer needs and designing its product to fit the customer's needs. Thus, to address their customers' issue of cheaper alternatives to the iPhone, Samsung introduced a string of smartphones with similar features at affordable rates.
These two examples highlight how both approaches can be used successfully in the same industry.
However, careful evaluation of the operation's strengths and weaknesses is essential to identify the correct approach towards marketing your product. Excellent customer service will not be able to salvage a weak product, and vice versa.
Therefore, it is essential to understand the relevant strategies required to implement either of the two approaches.
How to build a customer-driven approach
Now that you’ve learned about the concept of customer-driven marketing through real-life examples, here are some of the core components that go into building an effective customer-driven marketing strategy.
Identify customer personas
The most crucial aspect of any customer-oriented marketing strategy is the customer base itself.
Usually, these strategies are into play much before the actual product is ready for sale. You cannot possibly serve your customers if you are not aware of their identities, their needs, and their issues.
Therefore, the first step towards developing any such strategy is to gather as much data about the customers as possible.
But, what happens once you gather this data?
Careful analysis of this data allows the segregation of the customer base into multiple buckets, which could be based on purchase preferences, catchment regions, and pain points.
These are called customer avatars or marketing personas, which can serve as reference pointers for marketing teams to create personalised content or design targeted campaigns.
Capturing relevant data points about potential customers can be accomplished through multiple sources. These sources include web and social analytics, customer databases generated at the time of onboarding, and customer surveys to collect specific bits of information.
You can also opt for Acefone's contact centre solutions which support easy integration with in-house CRM, helping in further lead management.
Incorporate customer feedback
An effective customer-driven strategy is incomplete without the incorporation of customer feedback from time to time. It is not only important to do this at the initial point of product design but rather, equally important in the later stages for consistent product growth.
Various tools like live chat and feedback forms can serve as valuable sources of customer input about your products.
If a specific request comes in too many times, you can set up protocols and forward the request to the responsible team.
Furthermore, if you utilise such inputs to modify or improve your product, it serves to breed feelings of trust and loyalty within the customers who feel validated on the inclusion of their inputs.
Improvise customer service
In a customer-driven approach, the standard of experience during on-site or remote support plays an essential role in developing customer loyalty.
In fact, the core idea of a customer-driven approach refers to understanding the immediate needs of the customer and providing the necessary support through the product. This mindset needs to be adopted by all the functions within the operations.
The most important aspect of customer support is the time taken to respond and provide the necessary answers. The faster the resolution, the happier the customer.
Acefone's hosted phone system ensures a high-quality experience with 24X7 seamless support enabled through the cloud at a cost-effective rate. Opting for these virtual PBX tools can give you the required edge over your competitors, in terms of customer service.
Enhance customer retention
While the requirement of customer-related data is essential to develop the required personas for targeted marketing, you should not forget about the actual reason behind that data.
You need these insights for sustained business operations.
Customer retention becomes a critical parameter to measure the success of any business and you can utilise this loyal base to market your product to more potential buyers as well.
If you fulfil your customers' requirements through genuine and tangible efforts, happy customers are bound to recommend your services to their families and friends.
Additionally, you can reward your customers by introducing referral programs to incentivise 'word of mouth' marketing.
Adopting Acefone's toll-free numbers is another great way to break down barriers with new as well as old customers.
Conclusion
In the modern era, marketing approaches are witnessing a gradual shift from being product-centric to focussing on the overall customer experience as well.
Hence, it is essential to incorporate certain aspects of the customer-centric approach into the fold of marketing and promotion activities. We have also discussed how the inclusion of certain Acefone products can help you realise that aim at a faster pace.
To know more about this, get on-call with our cloud experts at 0800-084-3663 or drop an email at contact@acefone.com
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