Customer-Centric Marketing 101: How to Get Started

Looking for a competitive edge? While other brands are searching for ways to expand their reach and pull in lots of new customers, you can attract people to your offerings via a customer-centric approach that leaves them feeling satisfied. 

Customer-centric marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on every aspect of your business, from product development to advertising, sales, and beyond. It goes past basic customer data to help you build a deep understanding of who your customers are — knowledge that you can use to make them feel valued.

If you’re ready to learn more, keep reading. We’ll show you how to start building your own customer-centric marketing strategy.

What Is Customer-Centric Marketing?

With customer-centric marketing, it’s all in the name! It’s an approach to marketing that prioritizes your customers’ needs, wants, and interests. It goes beyond targeting your customers with ads and content marketing materials designed to resonate with them. 

Customer-centric marketing extends into every aspect of your business so that every interaction that customers have with your business is a satisfying one. Promotions, shipping and delivery, product packaging, customer service, and more — these are all crucial to creating a customer-centric experience.

The Advantages of Customer-Centric Marketing

The big advantage to customer centric marketing? Happy customers! And for your business, that means:

• Enhanced customer satisfaction, which leads to higher brand loyalty over time
• Enhanced customer retention, since happy, loyal customers are more likely to keep coming back for more
• Improved customer lifetime value (CLV), which gives you the ability to generate more revenue per customer without spending more on customer acquisition costs (CAC)
• Better opportunities for growth, because customer-centric marketing will provide you with insights about the things your customers truly want
• Increased referrals, because satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your brand to friends, family, or colleagues

Overall, customer-centric marketing can give you a major competitive advantage in your particular market sector. While costs are the largest influence on in-store or online purchase — 70% of consumers report that prices and promotions influence their in-store purchases, and 63% of consumers report the same for online purchases — the overall customer experience can have a big impact, too. 

For example, the same research demonstrates that 50% of in-store purchasers consider the quality or value of the product, and 43% of online shoppers report that the ease of the shopping experience influences their purchase decisions. In markets where competition is fierce among brands with similar offerings at similar price points, the improved customer experience you can provide through customer-centric marketing can set you out ahead of your competitors.

The Primary Pillars of Customer-Centric Marketing

There are dozens if not hundreds of different elements of your business that you can tweak to create a more customer-centric experience. If you’re not sure where to start, it can all get a little overwhelming — and that’s why we’re listing out the primary pillars that uphold customer-centric marketing efforts. When you’re looking for ways to make improvements, refer back to these pillars as general guidelines to help you discover what you could be doing better.

Company Culture

Building a customer-centric culture is critical for this approach to marketing — and it’s on company leadership to set the right tone. When you adopt this approach from the top down, it inspires team members to look at your business from every aspect and brainstorm ideas to create a better experience for customers at every stage of the customer journey. 

The following tips will help you establish a customer-centric culture:

• Promote an open environment that empowers people to brainstorm and share ideas.
• Recognize and reward team members who go the extra mile for customers.
• Keep the focus on building better customer relationships instead of simply increasing sales numbers.
• Prioritize feedback — both internal and customer feedback — as a valuable resource that can help everyone improve.
• Foster cross-departmental collaboration so that everyone from product developers to the sales team understands their role in the customer journey.

Customer Understanding

Creating a customer-centric approach is all about building a solid understanding of your customers. Lots of brands think they know their customers — but the truth is, they have a lot of demographic data without the essential insights that help them truly understand who it is that they’re marketing to. 

To truly understand who your customers are, here’s what you can do:

• Actively listen to what they have to say. Ask for feedback, then act on it. Read reviews to learn what makes the positive experiences so great and to see what can be fixed to prevent negative reviews. Keep tabs on social media, both comments and brand mentions, so that you can gather insights into preferences, needs, and customer behavior.
• Gather zero- and first-party data via your website, account signups, and loyalty programs. Demographic data is necessary, but also look beyond this data to gather more detailed insights into your customers’ behaviors.
• Invest in market research like interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires so that you can go on a deep dive into customer expectations, needs, and preferences.

Personalized Marketing

While a big part of customer-centric marketing revolves around creating a pleasant, seamless user experience, another huge component comes in the form of personalized marketing. Personalized marketing is a type of content marketing that dives deep into demographic data, customer preferences, and behavioral information in order to create content that is tailored to very narrow target audience segments — or even, at times, to individual customers.

Amazon is a prime example of how personalized marketing can work. Whenever you visit Amazon’s main page, you’ll see product recommendations based on your individual browsing and purchase history. Click into a product page, and you’ll find even more personalized recommendations for products related to the one you’re currently considering.

Here are some other ways you an implement personalized marketing:

• Create a digital marketing strategy that focuses on placing the right content at the right stages of the customer journey.
• As you gather data on new customers, you can begin targeting them with more relevant advertisements, personalized marketing emails, and dynamic content that offers personalized recommendations on your website.
• Interact with customers on social media. Larger brands may not be able to respond to every comment, but make an effort to reach back as much as possible when customers reach out.
• Consider implementing an AI-powered chatbot on your site. Chatbot technology has come a long way and can serve as a personal shopping assistant for customers by answering questions about products and store policies while providing personalized recommendations.
• Create interactive experiences that build engagement while helping customers to discover your products. Lookbooks, quizzes, and style match questionnaires are all great ways to do this.

Continuous Refinement

All types of marketing require continuous tweaks and adjustments to make your efforts more effective as time goes on. However, with a customer-centric approach, continuous refinement is doubly important. 

For example, aspects of your brand may change with time. Consider the streaming platform Netflix. Customer satisfaction with the streaming platform dropped from 90% in 2021 to 80% in 2022 and to 77% in 2023. That’s a direct result of changes that have eroded their brand’s reputation — like increasing the price without increasing the perceived value of the product, at least from the customer’s point of view. 

In addition to changes surrounding your brand, you should also make the following considerations a part of your plan for continuous refinement:

• Stay on top of constantly evolving customer needs, preferences, and pain points.
• Monitor demographics to stay up to date on possible emerging or declining audience segments.
• Keep a lookout for changing consumer trends to keep your messaging and product offerings current.
• Follow social media trends so that you can tap into the viral moments your customers are enjoying and engaging with.

An Example of Customer-Centric Marketing

Want to see how another brand is using this type of marketing to enhance customer relationships and set themselves up for long-term success? Let’s look at Nars.

Sometimes customers want to learn more about themselves and their own preferences — and you can help them do this through personalized experiences like quizzes and style finders. That’s what beauty brand Nars did when they partnered with Jebbit to create a series of quizzes designed to help customers find the right products. 

The results of these quizzes were stunning. As many as 25% of all website visitors have engaged with at least one of the quizzes, and they have a 74% average completion rate. The quizzes have logged 379 hours of digital conversations while helping customers with personalized product recommendations tailored to their unique needs. 

Nars reaped benefits from this campaign, too. Customers answered 183,000 questions, providing the brand with a wealth of zero-party data that will help them further refine their customer-centric marketing efforts in the future.

Build Long-Term Success With Customer-Centric Marketing

Customer-centric marketing encompasses more than just hitting your audience with splashy messaging. It’s a strategy that encompasses every aspect of your brand — your company’s culture, your marketing campaigns, customer interactions, etc. Use the strategies above to create a truly customer-centric experience, and you may reap the benefits of increasing customer loyalty and growing your numbers of sales.

To create the kinds of experiences that will keep customers coming back for more, partner with Jebbit. With Jebbit, you can go beyond quizzes to create a variety of interactive experiences like lookbooks, polls, and interactive editorials. If you’d like to learn more, schedule a demo.