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Marketing strategies need to be customer focused, here’s why

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Marketing strategies need to be customer focused, here’s why

Selling to individuals you don’t know can be challenging. If your firm isn’t converting as many customers as it should, it might be because you don’t know whom you are selling to. One drawback of traditional marketing is that the techniques put so much emphasis on getting customers to buy their products or services. Traditional marketing is a straightforward strategy in which the marketer informs customers about a new product by emphasizing its advantages and a breakdown of why they should use it. It is upfront and considered one-size-fits-all advertising that is forced upon you.

This strategy is still widely used, however, the interaction between a customer and a business has evolved because of digitalization. Even the sales and marketing funnel has been altered by digital as well. Marketers are now looking for fresh and creative ways to persuade consumers to use their products and services.
Photo by Kampus Production from Pexels

Customer-centric marketing, what is it?

Customer-centric marketing is a strategy that centers on marketing, product design, and delivery to the customer. By using user-centric marketing, you identify every one of your customers as unique individuals with unique habits, problems, and interests. With this knowledge in mind, your search for opportunities and methods to go past a one-size-fits-all strategy. Utilizing digital tools, it aims to better comprehend customers and their experiences so that the marketing plan can be created with them in mind. It also regularly evaluates the efficacy of our campaign.

Is customer-centric marketing important?

Repeat customers are 67% more likely to spend more, this is a good payoff if efforts are focused on customer loyalty. The easiest way to accomplish this is to prioritize your customers in all that you do. The range of what a customer-centric approach may accomplish expands as technology advances. To deliver highly tailored customer journeys, marketers can track a variety of different data sources and create increasingly detailed segments that offer more relevant marketing content. These days, it’s feasible for two distinct customers to have wildly different interactions with the same brand, each customized to suit their requirements, interests, and shopping preferences. Furthermore, the technology that makes this possible is becoming better.

In the end, marketing isn’t about disseminating your message through various media. A customer-centric marketing approach will provide your team with the most accurate analysis and, as a result, the best results because it’s about impacting the customer journey.

How to adopt a customer-centric approach?

A very common approach to approach to marketing strategy is to either create customer journeys or customer personas. But if you need an extra dimension to your customer personas or to understand customers’ thoughts and feelings in customer journeys, you will need to create an empathy map. An empathy map is built to empathize with your customers by understanding their thoughts and feelings making them easier to connect with.

You can use empathy maps to:


• Develop products, services, and customer touchpoints
• Supplement client inputs with a deeper understanding of them
• Create customer journey maps that reflect the present and the ideal
• Enhance client experiences
• Refine marketing and communication strategies

Empathy map activities, like any other customer experience tool, assist us in gaining customer loyalty, which has positive effects on businesses. Empathy maps can be updated as more knowledge is gathered about our customers, and these maps may highlight significant contrasts among personas, assisting us in identifying new ones. The one limitation of an empathy map is that it only captures a moment in time, much like a customer persona. It doesn’t consider the customer journey while making a purchase or the fact that they must follow several stages. Here’s where using the customer journey is useful.

How to use Empathy Maps


Here is a sample empathy map that you can use:

1. Identify your stakeholders Businesses can have a lot of customers who just have transactions with the company, a smaller customer base where the customer and business have a good relationship, or anything in between. You can select typical roles in mass markets (e.g. managers and directors). When you are personally acquainted with stakeholders, you must be cautious. Individual empathy maps can be created, but they must adhere to privacy laws, be treated with respect, and not be disclosed to unauthorized parties. To reduce risk, you could decide to maintain empathy maps at a safe level.

2. Assemble those involved in influencing the experiences of each stakeholder Call out to those who work in departments like finance, operations, engineering, HR, purchasing, marketing, sales, and customer services. Make empathy maps with a focus group. Engage those who hardly ever get the opportunity to discuss your customer.

3. Set your goals Many activities can be supported by empathy maps. For a start, you can pick one from the list above. Let your goals guide the questions you ask, as well as the steps you take in the subsequent steps. “Improving customer experience” is a good place to start if you’re new to empathy mapping.

4. For each stakeholder, create an empathy map Answer the questions on the empathy map template in a group setting, whether it be a physical space or an online meeting. Start with your ideas, but keep in mind that you might not know the consumer as well as you believe you do. What questions do you need to ask to be sure you understand? Change your questions if the map is not providing you with the answers you need to accomplish the goals you chose in step 3.

5. Let’s get to work You may now view your company from the perspective of your customers. Several opportunities could come to your attention:

• Errors you could have prevented
• Conditions for brand new or enhanced products, services, or customer touchpoints
• How to improve the value of your offer
• Techniques for expressing the worth of your offer

Whatever your empathy maps show, it’s critical to come to an understanding regarding the goal you’re trying to achieve, the change you want to make, who will do it, by when, and how much it will cost. It is rewarding to include customers in decision-making processes because it increases customer loyalty, engages employees, and improves business success. However, it can be daunting and requires focus. If you continually update them and act on them, empathy maps will give you access to the customer experience, are simple to use, and will pay you back for your efforts.

At Convergence Concepts, we invest our efforts into creating campaigns that are focused on the customers. If you need a specialized team in strategic marketing, please feel free to reach out to us at marketing@convergenceconcepts.com.sg to inquire more!