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According to a study by Cap Gemini, customers with strong attachments to a brand deliver a 23% premium over the average customer — both in profitability and revenue.
With benefits like that, it’s no wonder more marketers are shifting their strategies to include customer focused marketing — a strategy that places the individual customer at the center of all marketing initiatives.
You may be thinking, what about an ROI-focused strategy? Shouldn’t profit be the main driver of all our goals? The answer is yes, but as you’ll soon find out, customer focused marketing is one of the easiest way to boost profits.
This post will help you better understand the value of customer-focused strategy, along with some real-world examples of how the Brandfolder team implemented them.
The Importance of Customer Focused Marketing
Influencing prospects’ decision-making is more difficult than ever
A repeat customer spends an average of 67% more than a new customer, according to a joint report by BIA/Kelsey and Manta. In addition to the fact that attracting new customers is less profitable, it’s also more challenging than ever.
Why? Today’s consumers have access to an infinite amount of knowledge about a brand’s products, services, and reputations. Rather than looking to your sales or marketing team for information about your product, consumers can find everything they need from review sites, social media, and Google searches. When prospects are armed with knowledge about your brand’s weaknesses and strengths, they have complete control over the buying process.
So, when new customers eventually do sign up for a product or service, marketers must do everything in their power to create an outstanding experience. A customer focused marketing strategy is designed to do just that. The first step in creating great customer experiences? Learning as much as you can about a customer’s behavior, needs, and desires.
With the right marketing tools and a little bit of patience, brands can gain key insights about how a customer interacts with them. This includes details such as which software features customers use most often, and what email content they find most interesting. When marketers use customer behavior statistics to inform their marketing, they’ll be able to create hyper-specific initiatives that directly create value.
Catering to Your Customer’s Needs
As part of our customer focused strategy at Brandfolder, we’re always trying to help our customers discover value.
Since we’re a single product SaaS company, we keep a close eye on which features our customers like to use best. By keeping a strong path of open communication with our customer success and product departments, our marketing team can easily understand adoption rates of new features.
This strategy helped us identify a pain point with a new feature release called Custom Sections. Custom Sections allows our customers more flexibility when organizing the sections their assets live in, further adding to our customization offerings. A few weeks after the launch of Custom Sections, we checked back in with our customer success team.
We asked questions such as: how many people are interested in using, or currently using this feature? What questions or concerns do people have about it? How can we increase adoption of the feature?
Once we looked at the numbers, we realized that it wasn’t a matter of making the feature better. According to our direct support feedback, and reviews seen on G2 Crowd, customization was an important benefit of using our service. And while we had improved our options for customization, people weren’t using the new feature because we hadn’t done a thorough job of informing people about it.
Customer-Focus Strategy Lesson 1: It’s important to create features in response to customer needs — but that’s only half the battle. You’ll never know if your customers are realizing the full potential value of your product unless you pay attention to their user behavior. __ ### Increasing Engagement and Reducing Churn Rates __The most effective way to keep customers engaged and reduce customer churn is to help them be successful with your product.
Customers who hold negative feelings about your brand, or “actively disengaged” users, are responsible for a 13% discount in wallet, profitability, and revenue share (Cap Gemini). As you learned in Lesson 1 above, customer focused marketing initiatives help you create marketing materials that offer your users long-term value.
Once we identified our own problem of low feature adoption rates, we needed to find a way to help our customers find value. Thus, we launched two key customer focused marketing initiatives to boost engagement. First, we published the first installment in a quarterly blog series informing customers of our new features. Second, our product team supported this effort by rolling out a product release roadmap, which users can access from directly within the Brandfolder app. This roadmap shows every release, big and small, and explains why each one is valuable.
Both of these content pieces keep our current customers up-to-date with our product improvements. In fact, we’re even keeping tabs on who’s viewing these resources so we know whether or not they’re effective methods.
Customer-Focus Strategy Lesson 2: By working closely with your support team and monitoring online reviews, you can find more effective ways to offer value. When customers find your product more valuable now than when they first adopted, you’ll dramatically reduce churn rates.
Increasing Brand Advocacy
Current customers are the simplest and most cost-effective solution to increasing brand awareness
At the core of excellent customer support efforts are mutually-beneficial relationships. These beneficial ties between support providers and customers often mimic that of friendships — and they should be treated as such, with a gentle balance of give and take.
If you do hold these relationships in high regard, chances are, your brand advocates understand their own value (and they’re willing to share it, too). According to a study by Needle, 93% of brand advocates believe they are a better marketing asset for brands than sales associates.
If this is true, marketers should be leveraging these relationships in powerful ways, such as:
- Testimonials and quotes for landing pages
- Case studies
- Social media engagement
- Co-marketing resources, like webinars and eBooks
- Speaking events
Each of these customer engagement strategies are effective ways to prove value to your new customers. Countless studies have proven that consumers are more likely to trust a referral from a friend or equal in their industry than a large corporation. Therefore, these types of marketing efforts are two-fold: they show your customers how important they are to you, and they help prospects understand the true value of your company.
Customer-Focus Strategy Lesson 3: Customers are an extremely valuable source for brand referrals and organic promotion. However, they will only be willing to offer their value to you if they have a strong attachment to your brand.
Now you have a thorough understanding of why customer focused marketing is beneficial for modern brands. For more tips on creating great customer experiences, read How to Find Your Brand Voice in 5 Easy Steps or check out How to Build a Stronger Brand with DAM.
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