The simple truth is that no matter how good your sales team are, without customers you don’t have a business. And in an increasingly saturated market, shifting your marketing strategy from purely supporting the sales process to focusing on the customer first doesn’t just make sense—it’s a necessity.
Furthermore, to survive and thrive businesses don’t just need to keep up with their customers demands, but their behavioural changes and overall experience as well. The key, however cliche, is to stay one step ahead of them.
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Understand the anatomy of your customer
Most businesses will roughly know their target customer and who they want to buy from them. But it’s often worth asking: who’s actually buying from you right now? Do your research to find out what makes them tick: what problem did you solve for them, where do they hang out online, where do they live(roughly)? This should give you an indication of where you might need to shift your marketing efforts to get more conversions from like-minded people.
Market segmentation is an effective process to increase your focus and help align your marketing strategy. Naturally, once your focus increases, your competitive advantage will increase. Segmentation also plays a crucial role in expansion. When you segment your customers by geographic and demographic segmentation, you can cater to a particular territory, expand on your products or services, and work out how you’re going to communicate with them—because unsurprisingly, the rest of the world aren’t quite the same as Londoners.
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Have your GDPR in check and collect the right information about your customer
With the implementation of the GDPR regulation last May, businesses need to make sure they are compliant with how they collect and process their customers information.
For many, GDPR strikes fear in the most established of businesses, or, almost a year later is accompanied by a tired eye roll. But it really is worth being compliant—and not just to avoid the crippling fines.
By collecting the right information from people who are willing to engage with you, your marketing efforts will be more more targeted and therefore much more effective. And if you know which individual customers are the most valuable to your business, you can go that extra mile to encourage them to spend more with your business.
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The value of an emotional connection
Most savvy businesses are now placing high value on building lasting relationships with their customers. By making emotional connections a key part of their broader strategy, businesses can lead product design, pricing, distribution, and all marketing communications with the aim of creating an outstanding experience that outweighs the competition.
Think of the typical brands today that do this well. Apple, who are one of the top ranked brands that consumers feel the most connected to, place high investment on customer experience to build emotional connections that bring their customers back time after time—and in doing so command, and receive, a high asking price for their products .
It’s key to pinpoint what motivates your customer’s engagement with your brand, which will help you deliver more value and ultimately increase both your conversion rate and return on investment (ROI).
