What makes your customers tick?

For years, technology companies have been guilty of focussing on selling their products instead of communicating how those products can help the customer – what problems they solve. The latest ‘point zero’ release of a piece of software, or the increase in gigabytes to a piece of hardware is of interest to no one, but focusing on what that actually means to prospects, is. To adapt to this customer-centric way of doing business, marketers must understand what makes their customers tick.

If you’re an ambitious technology company in a period of growth, customer centric, not channel or product centric marketing is key to success. You must understand your customer’s journey, pain points and objections at every stage in order to deliver content to address them in your communications. Internally within your organisation, your in-house team must also be less product and channel focussed and more customer focussed to ensure that there is consistency in messaging across your channels. However, budgets don’t always stretch to a full-stack marketing campaign and it’s important to start with those areas that will deliver the most return on your investment. Utopia is delivering your messages seamlessly across all channels. That means online, offline, mobile and social media converging under one marketing strategy, and owned, earned and paid for media complementing and reinforcing each other. So where do you focus?

Simply – set your business goals, not channel specific goals and then build the programme around them. Focus on the end goal.

But what does that mean for the in-house marketer? It’s simply not feasible to be an expert at everything, and nor should you try. It’s more important than ever to work with agencies that can complement your in-house team’s skill set and work towards an integrated strategy. Working with specialists in your market to deliver more relevant and useful content than your competitors, will help prospects solve their problems and put you front of mind when it comes time to buy. Learn everything there is to know about your customers and keep focussed on them.

And if you don’t know what makes your customers tick – ask them – they’re usually only too happy to tell you.

If you’d like to know more, get in touch!