Why Customer Centricity Should Guide Your Content Marketing Strategy
To thrive in today’s marketing world, content marketers need to adopt a thorough strategy that will first and foremost address quality customer pain points and demands. Only in this way will marketers be better positioned to onboard new customers, retain existing ones, and drive sales in the long run. In order to accomplish this difficult task, content marketers must understand the value of customer centricity when establishing or upgrading their content marketing campaigns. According to CMO.com, the need is obvious. They claim that customer centricity is “a mind-set that companies need to adopt throughout the entire organization—not just marketing—to thrive in the digital world.”
Defining customer centricity in the marketing context:
“…looking at a customer’s lifetime value and focusing
marketing efforts squarely on that real-world,
high-value customer segment to drive profit.”
Customer centricity is valuable for several reasons. Let’s try to understand why by looking at 6 of them and why each should be considered when crafting (or upgrading) your content marketing strategy:
1. Focuses on the customer’s lifetime value
Rather than focusing on all the customers that can be found in your CRM database, customer-centric strategies can effectively pinpoint segmented customers according to their potential to generate revenue for your company. This can be conducted by launching highly targeted email marketing campaigns aimed at reaching out to specific users based on their potential to convert into paying customers or even simply to increase engagement of current clients.
How to incorporate this into content marketing strategy?
Since a customer’s lifetime value deals with the potential revenue generation of each customer, effective content marketing strategies will be required to consider different stages of the sales cycle. This will require understanding how to effectively respond and engage with hot leads and quality customer segments by directly reaching out with relevant messages, from promotions to links to informational content.
2. Answers customer questions in real-time
Today’s customers are brighter, eager, and also, less patient. They demand new technologies and features to meet their needs as well as answers to their immediate questions. Companies that adopt customer-centric marketing strategies understand the value of quality customer service. Thankfully, very simple plug-ins such as Olark and Tawk.to assist marketers in addressing immediate requests right at the source.
How to incorporate this into content marketing strategy?
Content marketing strategies should be aware of these and similar tools to help improve customer service requests. This can be an additional task assigned to a particular marketing strategies or salesperson in order to ensure that it doesn’t fall between the cracks. This, combined with the other main benefits of customer-centric content marketing campaigns, can go a long way in impressing customers and defining your brand.
3. Based on tremendous amounts of data
Data is everywhere for marketers, sometimes even seemingly too much to handle for the busy marketer that has to handle many tasks simultaneously. Thankfully, easily embedded marketing automation solutions can make actual sense of this mess by understanding the different nuances involved in the conversion and customer journey process.
How to incorporate this into content marketing strategy?
Content marketers should look at customer data as a source of potential content. For instance, look at data collected on a particular segment with similar past purchase behaviors and try to direct an appropriate email message. Pro tip: Examine marketing automation software in order to simplify this process and maximize your content ROI.
4. Involves the entire organizational structure/process
Customer-centric marketing campaigns don’t just lie within the marketing teams. Rather, some of the most effective companies have adopted customer-centric policies across the entire organizational structure, from R&D (engineering team) all the way to the initial customer profiling process (marketing team) and the eventual sales call (sales team). This fluidity is incredibly valuable for any company, as all are completely in sync vis-à-vis their customers.
How to incorporate this into content marketing strategy?
When customer-centricity becomes an inherent part of your organizational structure, your content receives a stamp of approval from readers. For instance, your writing can be tailored to a particular segment that has recently inquired about a new feature, thus demonstrating that your company is willing to go that extra mile.
5. Leads to customer loyalty
The need to engage customers to the point that one reaches customer loyalty is quite a challenge. In fact, most companies aren’t tackling this challenge adequately and endless promotions and offers from competitors make it even more difficult. However, by truly understanding the unique demands and needs of the customer segment, brands can personalize their services to the point where an alternative won’t suffice. After all, we know that it costs less to retain a new client than to recruit a new one.
How to do it right?
Engage with your customers in such a way that you offer loyal customers real value if they remain by your side. Establishing this relationship requires addressing these customers in a more personal way, from less formal email hellos and direct offers, to outstanding custom service and personalized messages.
6. Helps move ahead of competitors
The reality today is that content marketers are still struggling to appropriately adopt a customer-centric content strategy. This is good news for those actively seeking to change their current campaigns, as this can ultimately help your company move ahead of competitors. In this competitive digital landscape, such advantages can be crucial in terms of generating more revenue and maximizing performance.
How to incorporate this into content marketing strategy?
Understanding our competitors is one of the first challenges content marketers grasp with when considering how to go about their content marketing strategies. A tool such as SimilarWeb breakdowns similar websites for you in terms of traffic, thus helping you better understand how to target your content.
So let’s take a quick look at the 6 points discussed above:
- Focuses on the customer’s lifetime value
- Answers customer questions in real-time
- Based on tremendous amounts of data
- Involves the entire organizational structure/process
- Leads to customer loyalty
- Helps move ahead of competitors
All of these are valuable elements that customer-centricity brings to the marketing table. By focusing on the customer’s lifetime value, answering demands right away, making data-based decisions, rallying the entire organizational structure behind the customer, engaging customers to a point of loyalty, and moving ahead of competitors, content marketing strategies that are based on customer centricity will place you in a more effective position to maximize returns.