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To do so, you should study the market and establish the most relevant to :
1. Customers' needs
2. Market conditions
3. Best communications
Thank You
Marketing means to study markets, and build business models and strategies that helps grow your firm. There are two types of markets: the markets where you focus on your products and the markets where you focus on your customers.
Product Centric Companies gain profitability from bringing a blockbuster product/service, develop it, produce as much big volume of it as possible, while managing to keep the cost down. In Product-Centricity, you'll invest in innovating new products (think about Apple's products) and customers will come to you, and when time comes for further grow, you would either take your products to new markets (If you're main market is KSA, you might think of new markets in Qatar or Oman for example), or you may lay on your production experience and develop new products.
To the contrary, Customer Centric Strategy requires you to develop products/services around your customer needs. You'll research your customers and collect data about their purchasing behavior, analyze those data to better understand your customers, and finally bring the product that exactly meet your segment customers needs.
Profitability in customer centricity comes from three things:
And if you ponder those three profitable features of customer centricity, you may realize that it's expensive to acquire new customers (requires IT infrastructure to collect and analyze data for instance), but it's cheaper to retain those customers over time.
Here we come to your question : How to create an A-class Customer-Centric Strategy?
An ideal customer centric company will provide its customers with the products/services they exactly need, for free. Of course you cannot make it for free, but think about the possible way of doing it: to serve your customer. Customer Centricity Strategy aligns your firm's development and delivery of a product/service around the current and future needs of a select set customers (segmentation and targeting), why? In order to maximize your customer's long-term financial value to the firm.
[image source: http://img.thedrum.com/s3fs-public/news/tmp/2/tesco_9.jpg]
There is a retailer in the UK called TESCO. Tesco, way back in time. was a small retailer, they didn't have the resources to fight head to head with other giant retailers. They instead invested in deeply understanding their customers, and worked toward building their business model and loyalty programs round their customer needs. For example, they knew which households buy what from them and which not, then they used to send discount coupons to the those households who buy less. They were very much successful in their business, and now Tesco is one of the giant retailers in the UK. The funny part of the story is when Walmart tried to penetrate the UK market (one example of product centricity: going to new markets, from USA to UK ), Tesco knew who of their customers will buy what from Walmart, so they started sending discount coupons to their customers, retaining them for longer period.
So, Tesco didn't offer free products, but they knew what their customers exctly needs, and started sending them coupons to retain them for longer time; to raise the long-term financial value of their customers to Tesco; in other words, to raise their Customers Time Value.
Sometimes, you may give some customers products for FREE, only when you know you are going to get far more if they will stay loyal to you. Actually, customers aren't all the same, some customers are inherently more valuable than other customers. You want to focus on those future-valuable customers, you want to acquire them, retain them, and even develop them to buy more products from you.
Bottom-line, Customer Centric Strategy is about understanding your customer (like what Tesco does), looking forward into the future, and provide them with the products/services they need, as to build long-term profitable relationships. If you can do that, you do serve your customers better, and you will gain more profits.
Here are a quick to-do list:
[image source: http://www.providesupport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads///product-versus-customer-centric-companies.png]
First we need to narrow down the customer market in 3 categories A List, B List, C List
A List- are those customer that require the service based on the product viability.
B List- Those who are in confusion they need it or not need the product and just require the right person who can tell them how it can be helpful for them
C List- They don't care what you have they either buy it or not.
These details can easily be accessible using the last 5 years of sales and PR data.
With every category we need a different approach, A list require a detail study of the product with a skilled person who can answer their question and communicate with them.
B List require a person who knows the product and the way of communication with strong convincing skills without even try to convince.
C List require a person with strong analytical thinking.
Marketing is the process of creating customers, and customers are the lifeblood of your business. In this section, the first thing you want to do is define your marketing strategy. There is no single way to approach a marketing strategy; your strategy should be part of an ongoing business-evaluation process and unique to your company. However, there are common steps you can follow which will help you think through the direction and tactics you would like to use to drive sales and sustain customer loyalty.
An overall marketing strategy should include four different strategies:
A market penetration strategy.
A growth strategy. This strategy for building your business might include: an internal strategy such as how to increase your human resources, an acquisition strategy such as buying another business, a franchise strategy for branching out, a horizontal strategy where you would provide the same type of products to different users, or a vertical strategy where you would continue providing the same products but would offer them at different levels of the distribution chain.
Channels of distribution strategy.
Communication strategy. How are you going to reach your customers? Usually a combination of the following tactics works the best: promotions, advertising, public relations, personal selling, and printed materials such as brochures, catalogs, flyers, etc.
After you have developed a comprehensive marketing strategy, you can then define your sales strategy. This covers how you plan to actually sell your product.
Think the way a customer thinks! ...and build a strategy upon that. Knowing what customers need is key.
In addition to knowing latent demand from customers also anticipate your TG's upcoming goods/serivice need. In certain cases such need can be "created" by the marketing manager which otherwise might not be obvious. Reserach into the minds of your TG and read into their need-thinking patterns to plug into such needs before others. This way you will be ahead of your competition and will be "with" your customers as well as prospects.
first and fore most, keeping a good relationship with your customers and caring out a research on the current trend in the market sector, knowing what your customer want, if there is need to improve on services and delivering. planing ahead interns of product design and enhancement of new products and easy accessibility.
Begin your marketing strategy document with an honest and rigorous SWOT analysis, looking at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It is a good idea to conduct some market research on your existing customers at this point, as it will help you to build a more honest picture of your reputation in the marketplace.
Strengths could include:
Weaknesses could include:
Opportunities could include:
Threats could include:
Having done your analysis, you can then measure the potential effects each element may have on your marketing strategy.
For example, if new regulations will increase the cost of competing in a market where you're already weak, you might want to look for other opportunities. On the other hand, if you have a good reputation and your key competitor is struggling, the regulations might present the opportunity to push aggressively for new customers.
Source: http://www.infoentrepreneurs.org/en/guides/create-your-marketing-strategy/
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KEEP CUSTOMERS INVOLVED AND SATISFIED AT ALL THE TIMES
COMPLY WITH YOUR LEGAL OBLIGATIONS TO KEEP CUSTOMERS INFORMED
USE EVERY CHANNEL AVAILABLE TO TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS
CONSIDER APPOINTING THE KEY ACCOUNT MANAGERS FOR IMPORTANT CLIENTS
Stay away from product-oriented pitch - focus on thought leadership first. Especially in the ICT space customers seek guidance and help in understanding how new technology can accelerate their business or even create new business models (eg. Big Data analytics). Integrated end-to-end marketing campaigns with analysts such as IDC/Gartner... are quite efficient at increasing brand awareness and at the same time provide relevant content to customers, often leading to new project opportunities at the end of the cycle!
There is a gradual shift from traditional4 P's in marketing that is Product,Place,Price and Promotion to new one The "C" Customer.With the consumer era dawning upon us the strategy has to be more customer centric people who keep an eye on business will know which way the wind is blowing.Companies have been taking customers more seriously than ever.The marketing strategies are tailored as per the requirement of customer in order to improve upon customer experience.
