To what extent is your business strategy balanced with customer-centricity? Are you nurturing both sides to grow into a successful organisation?
I believe we need to create marketing strategies that balance short term return on investment with building long-term loyalty in customers. We need to understand the potential lifetime value of a customer and adapt the investment in communications with them accordingly. But how? I think the approach of segmenting your database using demographics is overly simplistic and lacks customer-centricity. Insight from what matters most to your customers is key to understanding how your business needs to adapt and makes direct communication with them work hardest. People often refer to this using the term ‘Big data’, but what does it actually mean?
In his book Connected CRM, David S. Williams gives a neat summary – he says we should make meaning from the data we collect to gain the insight needed to talk with our customers effectively. Organisations, he says, need to develop ‘insight platforms’ for identifying distinct categories of customers according to their activities and connect strategy, technology, data and analytics.
From there you can achieve personalisation of communications that are customer-centric and serve the needs of your business strategy; knowing your customers means that your communications are more likely to be consumed, shared or acted upon.
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