Customer-focused marketing – what is it?

Customer-focused marketing is how you communicate with your customer. Not at them. Not over their heads, behind your hand, nor in their face.

Customer-focused marketing is about talking TO your customers. It’s about responding to their enquiries, asking them questions, listening to their answers. And it’s about sharing their insights and experience for the benefit of other customers.

Customer-focused marketing is about using an ‘honest voice’ for your message – conveying understanding, curiosity and a willingness to receive feedback. This way your customers gain trust in your expertise and authority.

You have an opportunity to talk to your customers all the way through their journey with you. Here are three main examples of how you can shift to customer-focused marketing in your business:

Create a ‘Knowledge Centre’

From the moment they first search for you online, they are  asking a question that you ought to answer. Building up a library of customer questions and answers in your marketing collateral is an excellent way to attract visitors to your site. And where these questions  genuinely come from the people who want your services they are likely to be common and ‘frequently asked.’

Use the ‘second person’

How you address your customers in your website copy is also important. This is where talking TO them is key. Take a look at your home page a second. How many times does the word YOU feature? And how many times do you see the word WE?

Copy that talks TO your audience addresses them directly. When you speak in the second person you are putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. You are tuning in to their needs. And you are reassuring them that you can help them.

This principle also applies in ad copy, sales proposals, email campaigns, blogs, social media posts… in fact once you get used to writing in the second person there is absolutely nowhere that it doesn’t come in handy.

EXCEPT….

Ah – there is one exception to this second person rule. And it is a very important component.

Obtain Case Studies

Case Studies are accounts that absolutely must be narrated in the first person. That is, in your customer’s voice and from your customer’s perspective.

You want to be able to convey a vicarious experience of what it’s like to work with you and what value you add. Like in Harry Met Sally, you want your prospects to want to ‘have what they’re having’.

By capturing and relating your customer’s words, thoughts and emotions you are enabling others to understand your offering in a relevant, relatable and compelling way.

If you have a list of delighted customers and you haven’t yet produced Case Studies about them, then your marketing has a gaping hole. Case Studies aren’t rocket science – but they are hugely influential collateral in your customer-focused marketing strategy.

Customer obsession

More than ever in business if your message doesn’t begin and end with your customer in mind then you will lose market share.

And if you are a business already serving customers you have an infinite seam of richness to dip into to make your proposition even more appealing. Don’t waste that ‘natural’ resource!

You don’t have to be creepy about it. Just listen and respond.