5 signs of a customer-centric marketing team

Marketers who think of their customers’ and prospects’ best interests in everything they do tend to create marketing that resonates better and is overall more effective.

While most marketers believe they’re customer-centric, certain behaviors demonstrate it. Let’s look at five ways to prove your team focuses on customers.

1. You’re positioned to serve over sell

In many large, traditional companies, marketers are told to support selling at all costs. While that may have worked well a decade or two ago, today’s consumers are a lot more savvy, have many options and want to be served, not sold to.

If your company hasn’t adjusted to this mindset shift, there’s no better time than the present. Campaigns today need to nurture customers over time, leading them to grow a following with your brand so that when they’re actually ready to make a purchase, you’re the one they go to first.

A question to ask your marketing team:

• To what degree do you operate with the intent of putting customers and prospects first, with efforts that help serve them, versus only help sell to them?

If this is happening most of the time, you’re in a good place. If not, think about ways to give prospects more value, such as delivering meaningful content without a sales message.

2. You utilize customer-centric practices

You can try to put yourself in your customer’s frame of mind in many internal practices, such as advanced segmentation, personas, customer journeys and customer stories. They help you think about the customer’s needs rather than what you’re trying to sell them.

A question to ask your marketing team:

• Do you have a disciplined approach to being customer-centric, actively using advanced segmentation, personas, customer journeys and stories at every opportunity for audience relevance and value?

If this is your team’s typical behavior — congratulations! You’re on the right track. If not, take some time to incorporate one or more of these practices into your process and see if you notice a difference in your marketing outcomes.

Dig deeper: How to make your ‘ideal customer profile’ more ideal

3. You gather feedback at regular intervals

You need to always get feedback — not just at the end of a campaign or project. Gathering feedback after completing work is the worst time because there’s nothing you can do about it. 

Think about ways your team can get feedback regularly, such as looking at performance data and talking about it daily, regularly checking in with customers or customer service and determining what metrics indicate success versus a need to stop and pivot.

A question to ask your marketing team:

• Are we disciplined in our approach to gathering and utilizing customer or prospect feedback, proactively learning and adapting from feedback to improve our marketing efforts?

If this is a regular behavior on your team, well done! If not, try to come up with actionable ways to gather and discuss feedback as a team.

4. You optimize your ongoing marketing based on feedback

It’s not simply enough to just gather feedback, you need to do something with it. Whatever campaigns you have up and running, you must stop the ones that aren’t resonating with prospective buyers.

A question to ask your marketing team:

• To what degree does marketing use data and feedback to adapt and adjust what is already in the market?

If this is a regular team practice, you’re doing a great job with customer-centric marketing. If not, try to incorporate this practice into your weekly cadence.

Dig deeper: Marketers can operationalize customer feedback (whether you ‘own’ it or not)

5. You deliver work in small increments for testing and learning

Planning lengthy, elaborate campaigns for several months (or years) won’t work if your team focuses on customer-centricity. It’s all about working in smaller increments, testing and learning what works and what doesn’t. 

You can do this with A/B testing of content, images or calls to action. You may also try different channels to see which ones resonate best with your customers.

A question to ask your marketing team:

• Are we oriented and disciplined to quickly deliver work in smaller increments, testing and assessing the value delivered early on with the goal of adjusting and continually improving marketing efforts?

If this is part of your regular team practice, give yourself an A for customer-centricity. If not, think about creating marketing that can be launched more quickly — with fewer bells and whistles — and has the sole intention of testing and learning.

Dig deeper: Keys to successful marketing experimentation

Serving over selling: Switch to customer-first marketing

Today’s modern marketers need to be focused on the customer. By taking a service approach, utilizing customer-centric practices, gathering feedback at regular intervals, adjusting low-performing campaigns and working incrementally to test and learn what resonates with customers, your team can not just say it’s customer-centric but be living it daily.

Dig deeper: Customer experience for the modern marketer