Guest Post: Why Customer Experience Should Be at the Forefront of Your Marketing Strategies

This week, we feature an article by Eleanor Hecks, editor-in-chief of Designerly Magazine. She’s also a web design consultant focusing on customer experience and user interface. She shares how customer experience is a valuable marketing strategy.

If your business follows marketing best practices, you’re probably already implementing user research, collecting customer data, and targeting customers with personalized messaging. Then you describe your general marketing efforts as customer experience marketing. However, customer-centric marketing takes all of that a step further. And it can benefit your company greatly. 

Here’s why customer experience is of great value in your marketing strategies. 

Why Customer Experience Should Be the Center of Your Marketing Strategies 

Customer experience is an essential part of marketing these days. Why? 

Advertising low prices or offering endless options are out of date, and customer expectations continue to rise. When you make customer experience the forefront of your marketing efforts, you fulfill customer needs with a personalized approach. 

Simply put, if customers love the experiences they receive with your brand, they become your biggest advocates. In turn, your customers will tell friends, family, and colleagues about the solutions you offer. Customer-centric marketing also leads to long-term benefits for your business. You retain customers, increase brand loyalty and ultimately increase your bottom-line revenue. 

In fact, companies that rake in $1 billion every year can expect to earn an additional $700 million within three years of a customer experience investment. Plus, 86% of customers will pay more for products and services that come with a great customer experience.  

How To Infuse the Customer Into Your Marketing Strategies 

Customer experience marketing requires you to act with purpose. With that in mind, here are some tips on including customers in your marketing.  

Publish Highly-Specific Content That Brings Value to the Customer 

Your blog, website, and sales deck are pieces of content your customers will read. But for customers to find you, this means optimizing your content with search engine optimization. And to establish a successful knowledge center, they need to include targeted keywords their customers use to find answers. 

Another way to optimize content is by building backlinks to increase your search results rankings. Many content marketers reach this tactic by writing guest posts on other authoritative websites. 

Build a Customer-Centric Infrastructure 

Creating a systematic workflow is the best way to scale personalized experiences. For instance, customer resources require targeted messaging. But to build targeted messaging, it helps to look at your real-time data and analytics so you can segment your customers into different groups. As a result, you can create flows for each type of customer and implement a hyper-personalized customer experience marketing strategy.  

You have numerous ways to segment your user base. Consider what services they use, how active they are, and their job role. The more granular you are about your customer base, the more personalized you can make your marketing strategy. 

Understand Your Customers 

To succeed in customer-experience marketing, it helps to take the time to get to know your customers well.  To better understand your customers, experience your brand’s customer journey first-hand. Speak with your sales team as a customer and learn how each point of the buyer’s journey makes you feel.  

Consider surveying your customers regularly and reading reviews. The closer you can get to your existing customers, the deeper the insights you receive, which will help shape your marketing strategy.  

Instill Customer Experience In Your Marketing Strategies 

Remember, customer experience marketing focuses on their needs, so they keep coming back. In return, you remain competitive and improve your overall customer’s lifetime value.  

Therefore, it’s not about your plan or wants and needs. It’s all about them and placing your customers first. 

Eleanor Hecks is the editor-in-chief of Designerly Magazine. She’s also a web design consultant with a focus on customer experience and user interface. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dogs, Bear and Lucy. Connect with her about marketing, design and/or tea on LinkedIn.