How To Use Customer-Centric Marketing To Drive Sales (2024)

Peter Drucker, a renowned management consultant and author, shared a philosophy in his landmark 1954 book, The Practice of Management: “It is the customer who determines what a business is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper.”

That’s still true 70 years later. 

In today’s crowded battle for attention, standing out from the competition with a customer-centric marketing strategy is imperative. Custom-centric marketing campaigns engage and benefit your audience—on their terms. Learn what customer-centric marketing is, how it can help your business, and how ecommerce brands SURI and August developed their successful customer-centric marketing campaigns.

What is customer-centric marketing?

Customer-centric marketing is a marketing philosophy that emphasizes customer experience over immediate sales. It shapes your decision-making process across the business, from customer service and returns to packaging and shipping. 

By putting customers’ needs and wants at the forefront, a customer-centric strategy aims to create a valuable experience at every stage of your customer journey, ultimately increasing brand loyalty, trust, and reputation. This increase in brand love can pay off, too. In a study of more than 1,300 companies, 84% of organizations reported that improving customer experiences increased revenue, and 79% reported significant cost savings.

How to implement customer-centric marketing 

1. Know your customers
2. Involve the full team
3. Adapt your entire customer journey
4. Encourage user-generated content
5. Measure your results and adjust

A customer-centric strategy requires strong leadership, active feedback loops, and consistent readjustment. Here are some best practices for developing your customer-centric marketing campaign:

Know your customers

An informed customer-centric marketing strategy requires a deep understanding of your customer’s point of view. Gain this understanding by collecting as much customer feedback as you can. 

Perform market research about your target audience through quantitative approaches, like customer surveys or polls, and qualitative methods, like interviews or focus groups. Set up and maintain feedback channels like live chats, emails, product review pages, forums, and social media accounts to gather ongoing information about customer preferences. 

For example, after hosting focus groups, suppose you learn your target audience believes customer loyalty programs improve their shopping experience. You then create a program that rewards them for engaging with your brand on social media or writing reviews, as skin care and beauty brand 100% Pure did with its tiered program. Your new rewards program is popular with customers and the extra feedback it generates helps you learn even more about your customers. 

Involve the full team 

Prioritizing customer experience over sales conversions requires a customer-centric perspective throughout your business—starting at the top. Meet with your senior leadership or investors to get buy-in, then collaborate on ways to make your business more customer-centric. Share this direction with all departments and collaborate with your customer support, product development, sales, and marketing teams to bring a customer-centric approach to their plans. 

The more transparent and communicative you are about your customer-centric marketing plans, the better your team can support and execute that vision at every step of the customer journey.

Adapt your entire customer journey

Evaluate the customer experience at every stage of your sales funnel and customer journey, from pre-launch marketing—initial awareness of your brand, products, or services—to post-purchase communications—emails, customer service interactions, and reviews. 

Create a customer journey map that visually represents each customer experience stage. Develop a buyer persona that describes your ideal customer and gives you and your marketing team a clear idea of your customer base’s interests and behaviors.

For example, imagine you’re developing a marketing strategy for your new line of nail care products. After creating your buyer persona, you realize your customers enjoy learning about nail care and creative nail polish design.

Before your product launch, you might start a YouTube channel with relevant and entertaining tutorials teaching potential customers how to moisturize, polish, and paint their nails. At launch, you could share nail polish designs and host community nail painting challenges. To build post-purchase loyalty, you can incentivize user-generated content that features creative ways to use your product.

Encourage user-generated content

Engage your customers directly by creating a user-generated content program. This builds a connection with your community and the content they create can act as social proof, which helps potential customers trust your brand. You can also include the best examples of social proof on your product pages and social media accounts to help drive sales.

Incentivize user-generated content from your customers by running promotional campaigns that offer discounts or rewards if they post about your products on social media channels. Develop an influencer marketing strategy by partnering with influencers who align with your brand values and have an audience within your target market. 

Measure your results and adjust

Monitor key performance indicators relevant to marketing professionals, like customer lifetime value, Net Promoter Score, and customer retention rate. Regularly evaluate customer satisfaction to understand if customers receive enough value to purchase from your business again. 

Brands using Shopify as their ecommerce platform can access built-in analytics tools that provide valuable data about customer behavior, including what brought customers to your online store, what they searched for, and how long they stayed on your site.

Customer-centric marketing examples: SURI and August

Surveys and social proof with SURI

In 2022, entrepreneurs Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore launched their electric toothbrush company SURI after gathering significant amounts of customer feedback. They discussed their customer-centric strategies on the Shopify Masters podcast. 

“We ran a lot of surveys,” says Gyve. “We started with cheap surveys, any survey we could get that was not friends and family. We used SurveyMonkey, Attest, and then we did in-person interviews.” With insight about their customers directly from quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews, SURI was able to focus their marketing strategies on what works best for their customer base.

After launch, SURI also invested in user-generated content through reviews and endorsements to earn social proof and build its brand reputation. “People go to the reviews,” says Mark, “And the early adopters who did take the risk go like, ‘I really love this. I never thought I’d say I love brushing my teeth, but I’m looking forward to it now.’ And I think that early momentum then led to more people trying it.”

Community and transparency with August

August is an inclusive period care company that creates sustainable 100% cotton products. Social entrepreneur and cofounder Nadya Okamoto sat down with the Shopify Masters podcast to discuss how August’s business growth has always centered around customers’ needs. Nadya learned about her customers from years of feedback from focus groups, direct interviews, and community platforms.

“I think that the most important thing we did pre-launch was just a lot of community conversations and being really flexible with our timing,” says Nadya. “We really prioritized building community, talking to our community … to the point that we could be flexible on timing if it was in service of better understanding.” 

This community aspect is personal for Nadya. She maintains a personal TikTok account with more than four million followers to document her work as a period poverty activist and share how August’s products can benefit menstruators around the globe. The transparency she displays connects with her audience and builds authenticity.