You are currently viewing Customer Centric Marketing and Growth Channels – Review  | Kanza Akhwand

Customer Centric Marketing and Growth Channels – Review | Kanza Akhwand

Hey All, I have recently been honored by the CXL Institute and have joined their Growth Marketing Mini Degree Program. So I will be publishing a few posts reviewing their amazing course and giving a rundown of everything I learn.

The world now is completely different from the world it was a few years back. Social Media and the internet has seeped into pretty much every inch of our lives. The obvious advantage for this of course the fact that it brings the companies and the users a lot closer. In the time of Don Draper you could see the result of your campaign in the increase of orders and pretty much nothing else.

Facebook might be annoying and intrusive while they track us but facebook has been a big blessing from SMEs. Not only can you reach your target audience easily, it doesn’t cost as much as a billboard or a TV spot does. I got a little side tracked there, back to customer centric marketing. Actually not just customer centric marketing, your whole company should be focused on being or working towards being customer oriented.

What is Customer Centric Marketing?

Customer Centric Marketing is a Marketing Approach designed to prioritize customer needs and wants over all the other factors. Customer needs and interests can be gauged by using solid data about customer behaviors.

Customer Centric Marketing enables your marketing team to take the LEAD with four key benefits: Loyalty, Efficiency, Agility and Differentiation.

Loyalty: Establish a better relationship with your customers by making sure your message is built around them by personalizing your connection and offering message and deals that cater to them and their needs.

Efficiency: Invest in the best acquisition channels and avoid sending out blasts of information to all your customers.

Agility: Engage with your customers at the right time and right channel, strike when the iron is hot. Increase the CLV by offering the mana when it’s most like to resonate with them.

Differentiation: Stand out from amongst the crowd. Move past the mindless push that everyone else is doing remember that in Customer Centric Marketing what matters most is one metric: Customer Lifetime Value.

What Is Customer Lifetime Value?

CLV is a metric that in easy term is defined as the value a customer brings your brand during their entire time as a paying customer. It costs less to keep an existing customer as opposing to finding a new one.

Identifying Growth Channels

Major Growth Channels are

  • SEM / PPC
  • SEO
  • Content Marketing/Blogs
  • Email Marketing
  • Social And Display Ads

Obviously you can’t spread yourself over all these channels and expect great results from them all the time. You should focus on one channel at a time and move growth on that before moving to a new channel. How do you pick a growth channel to work on? Look at your audience, are they active on that channel. Second look at your goals if your goal is organic growth then you don’t want to work on PPC, you want to focus on SEO.

SEM / PPC

SEM is Search Engine Marketing and PPC is pay per click, these terms are often used interchangeably that’s because mostly when people talk about PPC they are talking about Google and Bing Ads. Most of them it’s just Google ads because Google has the market share on Search Engine ads. What’s great about SEM / PPC is that you already have search intent. Search intent used to describe the purpose of an online search.So for example if you search for best ACs, you will see ads for best ACs on top. SEM is great for conversions, like the other growth channels but SEM also works amazingly for brand awareness. If managed correctly you can double your investment on Google Ads.

SEO

On the surface SEO works to improve your websites ranking, but that ranking helps you get more traffic which converts to customers so in that way SEO is an amazing medium. SEO is also cost effective. SEO strategy is something that everyone has a different way if doing and working on it. For me SEO means setting up webmaster tools, benchmarking the current performance. Looking at your competition for both keywords and backlinks. Set your goals and KPIs, increase organic traffic for example. Then you find which pages are getting the most traffic and set up your keywords accordingly. I personally don’t like the outreach and tedious work you have to do for link building but it obviously needed to increase your ranking.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is your blogs and post to forums or websites like Quora etc. Content Marketing also includes social media like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Of course everyone including big businesses are playing around on Facebook, etc. So it makes sense to look at emerging channels like pinterest and reddit so you have less competition. Audience Fatigue is also a factor in bigger social medias.

Content Marketing also costs less over all then paid ads and ppc. Setting up UTM tags lets you track your ROI in Google Analytics, and put a real life value on your spending.

Email Marketing

Now obviously the first thing for Email marketing is lead gen, gathering leads and converting leads. For the emails two things you need to remember, Email Marketing is an easy medium for sharing information about your organization. It’s a newsletter share some news.

Make sure your emails are responsive, most people read emails on their phones. In fact make your emails mobile first. Your choice of ESP doesn’t matter but you want and need one with good automation.

Social & Display Ads

Using the BELT method for facebook ads, coined and created by Curt Maly. BELT is Belief, Engage, Lead and Transact. First step is understanding your customer journey, so you can properly strategize your campaign. Social Ads are mostly instagram and Facebook ads and Display ads are ads using Google Display Network and Facebook Audience Network.

I am having an amazing experience with the CXL Team, and I am learning loads of new things. Can’t wait to apply them.