Why Your Brand Needs a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy

This article, written in 2016, maintains a simple truth: Customer-focused marketing is critical for all brands.

However, a lot has changed in the marketing world since then, and the facts in 2023 are even more compelling. In the same way, this article deserved a massive update to reflect the continual evolution of marketing. Your brand strategy must keep up with customer expectations to stay relevant.

Research shows that acquiring new customers costs more than five times as much as retaining loyal ones. Furthermore, customers with strong attachments to your brand are 50% more likely to try your new products and spend 31% more than new customers.

With benefits like that, it's no wonder that customer-driven marketing continues to drive significant business decisions. This article explores the benefits of a customer-driven marketing strategy and how it relates to ROI. We even share what goes into a customer-driven marketing strategy and some high-profile examples of success.

Why Customer-Focused Marketing Is Important

Repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. In eCommerce, return and repeat customers make up over 40% of a site's revenue despite only making up 8% of total shoppers.

Yet, gaining shopper loyalty can be challenging. Customer-focused marketing gives you the tools to learn what your target customers want, so you can meet their expectations to achieve these vital goals.

Customer Experience Drives Decisions

Today's consumers have access to infinite 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.

In other words, customers have expectations when they approach your brand. When consumers have researched and know what to expect, marketers must do everything possible to create an outstanding experience.

It Allows You to Meet Customers' Needs

Customers have high expectations. Seventy-one percent of consumers want personalized interactions, and 76% become frustrated when they don't receive customized treatment. Customer-driven marketing begins with identifying your target customers and provides you with the knowledge to address their pain points and solve them with personalized interactions.

Increases Brand Advocacy

Customer reviews are the simplest and most cost-effective solution to increasing brand awareness. Surveys show that 95% of consumers read online reviews before they shop, and 58% will pay more for a brand's products with good reviews.

What's more, new customers are more likely to trust customer reviews than marketing efforts. Customers gain no benefits from promoting your products. These authentic reviews can only be garnered by delighting your customers.

What Makes Up a Customer Driven Marketing Strategy?

A customer-driven marketing strategy involves building your processes, products and services around your customers' needs in the narrative of what your product solves. Such a process requires you to identify the customers most likely to benefit from your products and develop a strategy around eliminating their pain points.

Customer-driven marketing strategies comprise five essential elements:

1. Market segmentation
2. Market targeting
3. Brand positioning
4. Differentiation
5. Feedback

How Do You Build a Strategy Like This?

With so much to accomplish, launching a customer-driven marketing strategy can be intimidating. That's why it's important to start with a clear plan. Take these steps to build a strategy that includes the five essential elements above:

1. Identify your ideal audience by dividing your market into segments and determining the group(s) most likely to need your products or services. You’ll be able to present your product or services that appeal to their interests, driving sales and inspiring brand loyalty.
2. Once you’ve identified your audience, divide your ideal target audiences into groups based on similarities. Your brand’s messaging will be stronger and more precise, creating a more effective marketing effort.
3. Determine your brand's position among competing products designed for your target markets. Customers will feel you understand their pain points better.
4. Develop an area in which you stand out from the competition. Your brand will be top of mind when customers are ready to buy.
5. Use feedback to improve your marketing strategy. Your customers will feel heard, deepening that connection between you and them and garnering trust.

How Do You Continually Implement It?

All the effort that goes into customer-focused marketing creates a significant amount of data for you to analyze to better understand the needs of your target customers. By working closely with your support team and monitoring online reviews, you can find more effective ways to offer value. As customers recognize you listen to them and value their feedback, you can reduce churn rates and build customer loyalty.

How Does This Tie Into Value-Driven Marketing?

Value-driven marketing creates meaningful value for your customers. It requires marketing professionals to cultivate a deep understanding of what their ideal customers appreciate most.

The ultimate goal of value-driven marketing is to shift from product-centric to customer-centric marketing. Since these goals align with customer focus, value-driven marketing is typically a pivotal part of a complete customer-driven marketing strategy.

3 Amazing Examples of Customer-Driven Marketing Strategies

Successful brands build products, services and strategies around the needs of their customers. These companies start with their customers and have products capable of solving their pain points. But as you can imagine, their customer's needs change.

So how can they keep up with their evolving needs? They keep up with their customers and use their data to continually develop services that cultivate ongoing relationships and eliminate pain points throughout the customer journey.

Take a look at these 3 companies doing amazing work.

Amazon

Amazon's focus on customers isn't a happy accident. The company's core mission is “to be Earth's most customer-centric company." They achieve this goal by starting with the customer and working backward through strategies that earn and keep customer trust.

Ninety percent of Amazon's services come from customer requests, while the other 10% arise from potential pain points customers aren't articulating.

For example, Echo provides customers with a hands-free way to connect various products to make life easier. Amazon's data-driven processes allow marketers to generate the most impactful analytical insight to inform what is most important to customers and what the organization should prioritize for focus and funding.

Nike

Nike's "Just do it" tagline doesn't mention its product or what it can help users achieve. Instead, it focuses on customer pain points and the hurdles they must overcome to achieve their fitness goals.

Rather than targeting professional athletes, Nike targets the average person to overcome obstacles to improve their lifestyle through physical fitness. The advertising strategy makes every customer a worthy protagonist capable of winning against all odds.

It isn't to say that Nike's success is based solely on selling dreams. The company continually addresses customer pain points to create high-quality footwear that meets the needs of its target customers, increasing brand loyalty. As a result, the marketing strategy comes full circle with dedicated brand enthusiasts who are ambassadors for their products.

Target

Target effectively reaches customers by positioning itself as an affordable and streamlined online and in-store experience. Target's tagline, "Expect more, pay less," embodies its ability to serve the needs of its customers on a higher level. With no shortage of mass retailers to compete against, Target uses multi-category offerings and affordability to position the retailer as a high-value customer option.

With a goal of putting customer service first, Target's innovations are related directly to customer needs. For example, the pandemic prompted the store to roll out an omnichannel experience practically overnight. They introduced “Drive Up,” their contactless curbside pickup experience and same-day delivery model.

When the company's initial loyalty program failed to meet the mark, the company regrouped to create Target Circle. This loyalty program makes personalization the centerpiece and is one of the fastest-growing loyalty programs in the U.S.

Now let’s take a look into how you can adopt these companies’ efforts with the help of digital asset management.

Where Does DAM Fit Into a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy?

A digital asset management (DAM) system is a software system designed to centrally store and manage digital content. DAM plays a crucial role in customer-driven marketing strategies, enabling marketers to deliver personalized experiences at scale.

Brandfolder’s DAM platform is top-rated and contains more features than others on the market. You can take advantage of robust security, adjustable cloud-based storage, rich search functionalities and more.

Key platform features include:

• Single source of truth in cloud storage: Make your life easier when you’re able to organize, control, create, distribute and measure creative assets across hundreds of formats including 8K video, documents, images and 3D in one central location. Easy online sharing: Share assets from Brandfolder using permissions, guest upload links, or creative and content automation tools
• Workflow automation: Facilitates the creation of upstream digital content, comprising workflows, content reviewing, rehashing and approvals, as well as integration with other creative tools and software.
• Personalization at scale: Helps marketers deliver personalization at scale with content automation, enabling organizations to develop and design campaigns that suit customers' contexts.
• Automated metadata tagging and retrieval: Digital content such as artwork, images, videos, logos, banners, website, and app components can be tagged for easy retrieval, tracking, and storing.
• Contextual campaigns: Enables organizations to develop and design campaigns that suit customers' needs and interests, ensuring that your content is relevant and engaging to your target audience.
• Brandguide: Enables you to create and house always-up-to-date digital brand guidelines in the DAM system to improve brand consistency
• Smart CDN: A built-in content delivery network (CDN) system allows users to copy and paste the CDN link of an asset and embed assets anywhere. Plus, any changes you make to the content in the DAM will automatically reflect anywhere the file lives online
• Integrations & API: Native integrations with 30+ software offerings that connects Brandfolder with all the other tools in your tech stack so your workflow is not interrupted.
• Insights & reporting: A reporting dashboard lets you monitor what other users are doing, keep tabs on asset usage and track top-performing content. Key reports and granular reporting data at the asset level enable users to identify effective assets and dig into user activity

Why Brandfolder?

Brandfolder is one of the most top-rated digital asset management software available because it's highly intuitive — making adoption much quicker — and visually beautiful, so teams truly enjoy using it. More importantly, our customer service team provides users an experience customized to their unique needs and goals.

We work with you to ensure you have the knowledge and tools at your fingertips to provide your customers with the personalized services that keep them coming back. Request a demo to get started with Brandfolder today.