A customer-centric marketing strategy can make all the difference between your business succeeding and failing. The concept is simple: walk a mile in your customer’s (or potential customer’s) shoes. By focusing on understanding and meeting the needs of your customers, you can foster long-lasting relationships and drive growth. Read on for five bite-sized tips to help you gain a better understanding of your customers and lay the foundation for your customer-centric marketing strategy.

Start by understanding who your customer is and is not.

  1. Demographic data like gender, age, location, and so on is helpful, but dig a little deeper to truly define your target audience and understand your customers.
  2. Evaluate who needs what you offer and why. What are their desires? Are they looking to solve a pain point, or do you provide something that brings joy?
  3. By understanding your customer at a deeper level, your demographic information will be more solid. Once you have identified the desires you satisfy, the question becomes: “Who is most likely to have these desires?”
  4. Build buyer personas (customer avatars) to humanize your audience as you create your marketing strategy and plan your efforts. (Note: You can use advanced AI tools like Open AI’s Chat GPT-4 to train a conversational AI with the persona you develop. This allows you to test content strategies and ask questions about the persona for a more comprehensive
  5. Engage with your customers and audience at every opportunity.
    Don’t shy away from engaging in conversations on social media and training staff to ask one or two questions on inbound communications like chat and phone calls.
    Customers will appreciate the extra interest in them, and the insights can truly help you grow your business.

A note on the term “desires”: In marketing, I believe that there is no such thing as a need without a want. Even oxygen isn’t a need if someone does not have a desire to live. Most purchasing decisions aren’t based on true needs; rather, they are based on perceived needs driven by desires. This school of thought allows us to dig deeper and truly understand the “why” behind buyer behavior. It can be a bit more time-consuming but is very effective at providing us with strong messaging that resonates with potential and existing customers.