Grow your brand with customer-centric marketing
Written by Matilda Schieren
Published on May 9, 2024
Reading time 8 minutes
Table of Contents
Imagine two brands, both selling baby formula.
Brand A features illustrations of babies and families across their marketing channels. They tout their ingredients, showcase their varieties for different dietary needs, and occasionally comarket with other baby brands.
Brand B highlights real babies and caregivers across their channels, including video testimonials and user-generated content. They encourage customers to register for their newsletter to receive regular educational tips about feeding, and reminders for when your baby might be ready to move up (or down) in formula intake. They partner with respected pediatrician influencers who many new parents already follow.
Are you already buying stock in Brand B? If so, that’s the power of customer-centric marketing.
Keep reading to learn why it’s the key to increasing brand loyalty, which (real) companies are getting it right and how to build a customer-first strategy.
What is customer-centric marketing?
Customer-centric marketing means putting the customer at the forefront of every interaction your brand has with them—before and after they purchase. Your customers’ specific needs, concerns and affinities should be the starting point for any new promotion, improvement or change you make.
In practice, this means actively gathering intel on your customer through surveys or social listening, analyzing that data and proactively giving your customer what they want, or what they don’t yet know they want. Prospective customers should see themselves reflected in your brand before they even buy from you—and current customers should be such fierce advocates, they’d never think about switching.
Consider some of these stats from The 2023 Sprout Social Index™: 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when brands prioritize customer support. And 51% say the most memorable thing a brand can do on social media is respond to customers.
![Callout card highlighting a stat from the Sprout Social Index saying 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support.](https://media.sproutsocial.com/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-04-at-1.52.16-PM-1.png)
Putting customers at the heart of your marketing strategy is nonnegotiable.
What are the benefits of customer-centric marketing?
Getting customer-centric marketing right requires your entire team to invest in knowing your audience inside and out. It also means conducting ongoing research to understand how your customers’ needs and challenges change over time. It’s a big lift, but one that pays off in the form of:
- New customer acquisition: Business growth depends on attracting new customers. Companies that put their audience first inevitably stand out, even in crowded spaces up against legacy names. Consider acne treatment brand Starface, which was named to Bain’s 2024 Insurgent Brands list—a compilation of businesses generating over $25 million in annual revenue, that have experienced more than 10 times their category’s average growth rate in the past five years. Starface is intentional about meeting their Gen Z audience where they are, focusing on strategic influencer partnerships, amplifying meme culture and even turning audience social posts into physical billboards.
- Loyalty and retention: Once you acquire those new customers, are you keeping them for life? Businesses need to foster brand loyalty in order to prevent customers from churning to the competition. When customers see themselves in your marketing campaigns, feel like their questions are promptly answered, and know their feedback is taken seriously, you’re giving them concrete reasons to stay.
- Social proof: A Q1 2024 Sprout Pulse Survey of 2,000 consumers found that social media is the number one channel for product discovery. The organic and paid content you post on your brand channels plays a large part here—but so do the comments, testimonials and user-generated content from existing customers. Audiences put tremendous faith in peer recommendations before they buy. Proactively encouraging customers to share this kind of content generates positive word-of-mouth for your brand, and drives future sales.
4 brands perfecting customer-centric marketing
Whether you’re promoting a new product, jumping on a trend or triaging when something goes wrong, social is the perfect arena for gathering customer insights to infuse across your marketing plan. Here are four brands embedding social into their customer-centric marketing strategy–and takeaways for how you can do it yourself.
McDonald’s listens and leans into subcultures
When you serve millions of customers globally on a daily basis, it’s safe to say your brand has mass appeal. But McDonald’s doesn’t simply settle for generic campaigns that unite burger lovers everywhere. The fast food giant has made a concerted effort to root all of its recent marketing efforts in what they refer to as “fan truths”—in other words, specific customer insights.
With the help of social listening, their marketing team is able to pinpoint even the most niche trends that segments of their customer base are tuning into. This kind of intel was the driving force behind the “WcDonald’s” campaign, a marketing and product play that leans into how the brand has been referenced in anime for decades.
This kind of subculture marketing only happens when you keep a constant pulse on what your customers are talking about or engaging with online (including the topics that aren’t directly related to your brand or industry). With that information, you can design marketing strategies that acknowledge your audience as whole people with diverse interests—not simply fast-food diners or online shoppers.
Atlassian aces social customer care
Our Index research found that consumers think prioritizing direct audience engagement makes brands more memorable than publishing trendy content or taking risks with posts. This is something B2B software company Atlassian takes seriously—rather than just maintain a certain social publishing volume, they focus on creating meaningful moments with their vast user base.
One of the brand’s values is “Don’t f*** the customer,” and this audience-first mentality shines through on social. Their Jira brand in particular runs a masterclass on what robust social customer care should look like. For instance, they are quick to respond to product feedback and questions—but in a way that feels personal, not robotic.
They also make it a point to monitor (and sometimes chime in on) broader conversations happening about project management tools. This approach lets Atlassian’s social team build stronger relationships with existing users and build awareness with future customers.
Zappos makes customer obsession a timeless style
For more than two decades, online retailer Zappos has been on a mission to “deliver WOW.” This focus on delivering an unmatched customer experience and service is embedded across the company’s values, hiring processes and (of course) its digital investments.
The brand wields its vast amount of customer data for good—that is, valuable personalization. For instance, Zappos sends tailored emails to parents based on when their children might be ready to size up in shoes. Small acts of service like this can alleviate major stress in a customer’s day, and make Zappos the hero.
Zappos also recruits real customers to be the face of their creative efforts. Their “Start Where You Are” campaign features runners at all stages of their athletic journey, with a variety of backgrounds and body types.
Salesforce delivers 360-degree love for their brand advocates
It should come as no surprise that a brand with the tagline “The Customer Company” walks the walk when it comes to customer-centric marketing. Salesforce is deeply committed to its Trailblazer community: a millions-strong group of Salesforce users who connect in online forums, at in-person events and on social.
Salesforce’s social media team uses Sprout’s Smart Inbox, listening and analytics capabilities to stay in sync with their Trailblazers across more than 150 of the company’s social channels. Whether it’s celebrating a Trailblazer’s new certification or hyping up presenters at a World Tour conference, Salesforce never misses an opportunity to engage 1:1.
B2B technology is not always the first industry that comes to mind when you think of proactive community management, but Salesforce turns that notion on its head.
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