Why Your Customer Strategy Should Come Before Your Digital Strategy

rayw

| 12 Dec 2013 |

Although digital marketing is playing a more prominent role in the communications mix, its purpose remains consistent: to showcase how a product can resolve a consumer’s problem. And with the introduction of digital media, this can be done easily and cost-effectively through digital channels such as YouTube and GoToMeeting. That said, while digital tools can improve marketers’ ability and productivity, they should always focus on resolving customers’ needs, challenges, and desires. Here are 3 reasons why you should place your customer strategy before your digital strategy:

You can find suitable digital channels.

By placing your consumers as the chief priority and understanding them inside-out, you can determine which digital channels best suit their lifestyles. For example, you can discover that the best time to reach your audience is after 7pm through email as vast majority of your audience are accountants who work from 8am and 6pm. This consumer-centric view enables you to identify the optimal time and communication channels to interact with your consumers so that you can enhance your marketing result.
You can define metrics that directly reflect your customer satisfaction.

Digital marketing is incredibly data-driven. It allows you to examine your monthly web traffic, bounce rate, and other metrics that measure your customers’ engagements. That said, in order to comprehensively evaluate your customers’ satisfaction levels, you have to examine digital activities that reflect their engagements. For instance, you may think that the amount of time and the pages your visitors go through on your website indicate their level of engagement. In this case, you would assign time duration and pageviews per visit as the primary metrics of engagement to gain a bigger picture of your consumers’ interactions. Generally speaking, the more relevant metrics you can come up, the better. According to an analogy illustrated by the CEO of GfK, a market research company, “a thermometer only gives you one metric for evaluating a person’s health; to get a more robust understanding of wellness requires multiple sources of data, e.g., blood pressure, X-rays and more. In the same way, you don’t want to get caught up in looking at how your customers act in just one environment – social media platforms, for example, or retail stores. Your focus needs to be broader and more diverse.” By focusing on your consumers and their activities, you can come up with a variety of metrics that precisely reflect their engagement and satisfaction levels.
You can avoid becoming a slave to digital marketing.

Instead of joining social networks blindly, businesses should define what they want to achieve with their social pages and determine which network would be the optimal choice. According to VentureBeat, 15 million businesses, companies, and organizations now have a Facebook page. But how many are actively using it? Companies should first assess their audience’s daily activities and see which digital outlets best suit their consumers’ lifestyles. For instance, if a majority of your target audience is independent consultants who are mostly on Twitter instead of Facebook, you want to grow a Twitter community instead. After all, digital channels such as Twitter and Facebook should be used to communicate with prospective and current clients. Hence, businesses should always focus on their customers’ activities and identify a communication channel that best bridges the gap between them and their consumer market.

Amid the digital evolution, consumer-centrism remains key in establishing strong consumer satisfaction. By placing your consumer strategy before your digital strategy, you can find digital channels that best suit your consumers’ digital activities and lifestyle. And it’s only through the development of consumer-centrism will you be able to gain brand loyalty and recognition in today’s digital-savvy, highly dynamic digital marketing world.

Why Your Customer Strategy Should Come Before Your Digital Strategy

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Why Your Customer Strategy Should Come Before Your Digital Strategy

You can find suitable digital channels.

You can define metrics that directly reflect your customer satisfaction.

You can avoid becoming a slave to digital marketing.

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