Beyond The Sales Funnel: How to build a Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy for Long-Term Success

As businesses shift towards a more customer-centric approach, it’s becoming increasingly important to focus on building long-term relationships with customers, rather than simply pushing them through a sales funnel. In this article, we’ll explore how to build a customer-centric marketing strategy that delivers meaningful results, adding sales and shareholder value.

Understand Your Customer

The first step in building a customer-centric marketing strategy is to truly understand your customer. This means taking the time to research and analyse your target audience, their behaviours, interests, and pain points. By understanding your customer, you can create marketing campaigns that are tailored to their needs and are more likely to resonate with them. We call this “Persona Targeting”.

Start by creating detailed buyer persona which represents your ideal customer. These personas should include information such as age, gender, job title, interests, and pain points. Use data from your website, social media, and other marketing channels to inform your personas, and keep them up to date as your customer base evolves.

Once you have a clear understanding of your customer, you can start to build a marketing strategy that focuses on meeting their needs, rather than simply pushing products or services.

Engage Your Customers

Once you understand your customer, it’s important to engage with them on a regular basis. This means building a strong presence on social media, regularly publishing blog posts and other content, and offering valuable resources such as eBooks and webinars.

Engaging with your customers is about building trust and credibility and establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry. By offering valuable content and resources, you can position yourself as a thought leader. Your brand becomes trusted and the sales strategy pivots towards a consultative sale, rather than a direct sales pitch.

In addition to content marketing, consider offering loyalty programmes or other incentives to encourage repeat business. This can help build a long-term relationship with your customers and encourage them to refer others to your brand.

Focus on Customer Experience

In a customer-centric marketing strategy, customer experience is key. This means focusing on providing a seamless experience from start to finish, and making sure that your customers feel valued and appreciated. Marketing touchpoints are the key to ensuring an omni-channel customer experience.

Start by optimising your website and other digital channels to make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for. Focus on the strategies which drive conversions, sales transactions and lead generation. This might mean offering live chat support, simplifying your checkout process, or creating a mobile-responsive website. Remarketing strategies, such as abandoned shopping cart emails, should also be considered to drive up to 75% more conversions.

Beyond digital channels, consider how you can provide an exceptional customer experience in all interactions with your brand. This might mean offering personalised recommendations or follow-up emails, or providing exceptional customer service when issues arise. Soft touch points such as automated IVR telephone music can contribute to a unified customer experience.

Measure Success Based on Customer Satisfaction

Finally, in a customer-centric marketing strategy, success is measured based on customer satisfaction, rather than simply sales numbers. This means tracking metrics such as customer retention rates, referral rates, and customer feedback, to ensure that your customers are truly happy with their experience. Tools such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) can all be helpful metrics.

When measuring success, it’s important to look beyond the initial sale, and focus on building a long-term relationship with your customers. This means tracking metrics such as repeat business, cross-selling or upselling rates, and customer lifetime value.

By focusing on customer satisfaction, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are truly customer-centric, and that your customers remain loyal to your brand for years to come.

Building a customer-centric marketing strategy is about more than simply pushing customers through a sales funnel. It’s about understanding your customer, engaging with them on a regular basis, focusing on providing an exceptional customer experience, and measuring success based on customer satisfaction.

By taking a customer-centric approach, you can build long-term relationships with your customers, and establish your brand as a trusted advisor in your industry. This can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher referral rates, and ultimately, long-term success for your business.

Building your marketing strategy to fuel the sales funnel

Know Your Audience: The first step to building a lucrative sales funnel is to understand your target audience. Use data from your website, social media, and other digital marketing channels to create detailed buyer personas. This will help you tailor your marketing efforts to the specific needs and pain points of your target audience.

Create Valuable Content: Once you understand your audience, create valuable content that will resonate with them. This could be blog posts, videos, infographics, or other types of content that provide value and position your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

Drive Traffic to Your Website: In order to build a sales funnel, you need to drive traffic to your website. Use a combination of tactics such as search engine optimisation (SEO), paid advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing to attract visitors to your website.

Capture Leads: Once visitors arrive on your website, it’s important to capture their contact information so that you can continue to market to them. Offer valuable resources such as ebooks, webinars, or free trials in exchange for their email address or other contact information.

Nurture Leads: Once you have captured leads, it’s important to nurture them through the sales funnel. Use email marketing campaigns, targeted advertising, and other tactics to keep your brand top of mind and move leads closer to a purchase decision.

Close the Sale: Finally, it’s time to close the sale. Use targeted offers, personalised recommendations, and exceptional customer service to help leads make the decision to purchase. Don’t forget to measure your results and continually optimise your sales funnel to improve conversion rates and increase revenue.

How to get results from your marketing strategy

Are you ready to take your digital marketing efforts to the next level? At Iconic Digital, we understand that managing digital marketing can be overwhelming and time-consuming, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. That’s why we offer comprehensive outsourced marketing services that can help take your business to new heights.

Our team of experts can help you develop and execute a customer-centric marketing strategy that is tailored to your business’s specific needs and goals. From website design and development to social media marketing, SEO, PPC advertising, and more, we have the knowledge and experience to deliver results that drive real business growth.

Don’t let the challenges of digital marketing hold you back. Partner with Iconic Digital today and discover the power of a truly effective marketing strategy. Contact us now to learn more about our services and how we can help your business thrive.