Customer-first marketing is a marketing philosophy that puts your customers and prospects at the center of everything you do.
When customers come first, your business can generate sustainable profits over the long term. It is not a competition between customers and profits, it is a mixture of both.
High-performing companies measure their success against a balance between customer satisfaction and financial success.
When was the last time you spoke to one of your customers?
To truly understand your customers, you need to engage with them. Only then can you see what they are looking for. Once you understand this, you can adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.
By segmenting your customers, you can create relevant and personalized content for the right group. Everyone is different, and sending a generalized advertisement or message to a large audience, regardless of what stage of the customer journey they are in, may not be the best use of your time or budget. It can also do more harm than good, as sending an irrelevant message can put people off your product or damage your brand.
It starts at the top
It doesn’t matter who has the great ideas in your company. If the leadership team isn’t behind it, it’s going to be really difficult to stick it out.
Because of this, it’s fundamental that customer-first marketing comes first from the C-suite to the customer-centric team members. The management takes care of the achievement of the general corporate goals, customer acquisition and retention as well as the end result. Therefore, it is also important to them to keep the customer at the center of the company’s activities.
Getting stakeholders involved early on will be critical to how successful this type of marketing can be for your company.
Empower your employees
Simply doing this for your marketing promotion is not enough, as it makes no difference to the customer or prospect whether it is a retarget ad they saw on Facebook or a call to your front desk. For them both are interactions with your company.
This underscores the need to train and educate your entire company on the importance of being a customer-first company. Use this as an opportunity to highlight and deliver additional training that your co-workers may need – to make these customer interactions as good as possible.
Enabling your employees also helps them do better work as they feel they are valued, part of the bigger vision, and that their work and contributions make a difference not only for the company but also for clients and clients make your life.
Get Relevant: The Three Big-Content Es
The simple truth is that if you don’t provide relevant and useful content and interactions with your customers, they will eventually go elsewhere.
Because of this, you need to make sure that you are constantly looking for ways to improve your marketing and communication strategy so that you can deliver educational, fun, and engaging content.
You want your content or message to solve your customer’s problems, but your competitors already can. To make you stand out from these, you need to tick those boxes and put the customer first.
No organization is completely customer-centric. Think of this as a trip. Every step you take to become more customer centric is a step towards business life and higher profits.
Kieran S-Lawler is Marketing Director and Rachel Holey is an SEO Consultant at Hallam.