How to Build a Customer-focused Marketing Strategy

What does your customer want?

It may seem like an obvious question to ask, but many organizations still don’t really know the answer—and the ones who don’t often fail. In fact, four of the top ten reasons startups flop are due to a clear misalignment with their customers.

According to oft-cited research from CB Insights, having “no market need” is the top reason startups fail. While that’s clearly the most egregious mistake you can make in business, there are plenty of others as well, including having a non-user-friendly product (17%), poor marketing (14%), or a habit of ignoring customers (14%). If the growing number of CB Insight’s startup failure post-mortems are any indicator, these themes may not be letting up anytime soon.

Of course, not all non-customer-centric businesses fail. Many simply see less success, lower profitability, and a diminished return on investment than their customer-centric counterparts—but, of course, none of those are desirable outcomes.

Simply put, being customer-focused is a big key to success. Most business leaders know this, but somehow still don’t focus on it. Instead, they get caught up in how amazing their brand is, how much value they offer, or how smart their business is. And while those points may be valid, unfortunately, this may not be what matters most to prospective customers.

So, if you’re going to build a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship with your prospects and customers, you’ll need to connect at the ground level: your marketing. Here’s how.

1. Set the stage for customer-focused marketing

Step one: Figure out who your customers are by putting together buyer personas: fictional representations of your real target customers.

To be truly comprehensive, you’ll need more than just their demographic information or how they might engage with your brand. That means they should include psychographic data as well. What does that look like? Think everything from what they enjoy and how they behave to whether they prefer dark roasts, do yoga after work, or craft with their kids on Saturdays. Strong buyer personas document their wants, needs, pain points, interests, and values—all of which you can then tap into through every stage of the buyer’s journey.

As you put these together, make sure your personas are composites of many people. In other words, don’t fashion them to mirror a single, actual individual; instead, find commonalities among those who do business with you. Consider interviewing actual customers (or folks you think would be your customers) as you build them. If you need more information as you go, I suggest using HubSpot Academy—it’s one of the best resources out there.

2. Outline your strategy

When I begin to build out a marketing strategy, I first frame out what marketing methodologies will help the organization reach its overarching goals.

One of the best ways to do this is starting with a mind map. By placing the primary objective at the center and branching out into smaller marketing initiatives that will support it, you’ll have a clearer picture of everything you’ll need to undertake, what the initiatives will accomplish individually, and what efforts will supplement or boost others—and how.

For example, let’s pretend you own a local service-based business, Local Incorporated (LI), that sells your service for $1,000. Your customers are seniors who aren’t tech-savvy but use Facebook and play casual ad-supported games on their smartphones. Local Incorporated aims to make $100,000 this year.

For your smaller goals, a goal of acquiring 75 new customers and a goal of capturing 25 previous customers to purchase your service again would make you hit your target.

To acquire those new customers, I would map out a social media plan based on paid ads and sponsored content on Facebook as well as media buys for ads on mobile games. To re-engage previous customers, I would map out SMS marketing and direct mail efforts. I’d also make a connection to Facebook, as previous customers are more likely to be fans and followers, and therefore more likely to engage with LI’s ads and organic and promoted content.

Ultimately, this approach maintains a customer-centric approach by eliminating any efforts that aren’t aligned with the target audience.

3. Plan your tactics

Once you know the avenues you’ll pursue, it’s time to put together the tactics you’ll employ.

While the mind map hinted at some of these, it’s important to identify how you specifically want to execute the avenues you’ve selected, the frequency of activities, your general approach to messaging, and what steps need to be taken—all with how your personas will engage with them in mind. To paint a real picture of this, we’ll return to our Local Incorporated example.

Let’s say you’re planning how to use Facebook to reach your audience organically. Let’s also say your personas frequently use Facebook to keep up with friends and family, catch up on the latest news, laugh at memes, and see what’s new with their favorite local businesses—like yours!

Based on the information above, in your tactical planning, you might decide you’ll post to your page at least once daily, share posts on local news, share and potentially create memes, and only post self-promotional content when you have worthwhile updates to give. That way, there’s always something new for them to engage with—and plenty of options to do so.

In turn, make sure your plan accounts for sourcing and aggregating, guidelines on what’s best to share, and how to respond to glowing comments from your fans (and snark from trolls).

4. Plot your customer-centric campaigns

So far, everything has been relatively high-level, but campaign planning is a big part of marketing strategy.

While it’s easy to get fixated on outcomes during campaign planning, it’s imperative to routinely put yourself in your buyer’s shoes, starting with the stage of the buyer’s journey they’re on. If your potential buyer is in the Awareness stage, your messaging, content or ad types, and calls to action should speak to their limited experience, knowledge and exposure—and ideally, move them down the funnel. Just remember, what resonates with your audience varies from persona to persona as well.

Before launching any campaigns, double-check that they meet a few criteria to ensure the actions you want them to take—and the outcomes you desire—make sense for them, given what you’re presenting. Any campaign needs to be tailored for:

• Your desired business outcomes
• A specific stage of the buyer’s journey
• One or more of your personas (and their pain points, wants, needs, habits, and values)
• The next steps you want the target audience to take
  

If your campaign idea fits the bill, finish your planning by plotting out what’s needed to make your initiative viable and what actions are needed during or after the campaign, such as follow-up or further promotion.

So, without going even farther into the weeds (and giving away all of my secrets), that’s how to build a customer-focused marketing strategy—thoughtful planning based on actually knowing your customer and what they want while still keeping your business objectives in mind. In the end, this approach will give you the greatest chance of working your marketing magic, seeing better overall performance, and getting a higher return on your marketing investment.