Customer Centric Marketing - Watch out for flying cars!

The idea of understanding your customers needs, monitoring their actions and sending targeted messaging based on those behaviours is incredibly exciting and gets us closer to being truly useful to customers and in turn getting more returns on our marketing investment. Done right, it should be some sort of symbiotic nirvana where the customer tells us more about them and we in turn have more of a conversation rather than captain shouty-pants coming to town.

However, after many years doing this type of work for various companies, I thought we should mark down a few pointers and home-truths to help anyone who is considering getting involved. Don't get me wrong, this is an incredibly exciting time and we are getting closer by the day to understanding which 50% of our marketing budget works - it just involves patience, smarts and not getting swept away by the Kool-Aid brigade.

1. Work out if you actually want to be truly customer centric

"Of course we do!" I hear you cry, "what an idiotic question!", well OK smarty pants - but is your organisation geared up for what it actually entails? You have to completely understand the needs of your customers and ensure that your business has the capacity to listen and adapt based on what people actually want. This is beyond Sophie the Social media whizz getting feedback and running polls, people will actually expect change and they will give you a tonne of s**t if you don't deliver.

We spend a lot of time with clients developing personas (snapshots of key customer and prospect types). But taking time to dissect these people, their wants and needs and consumption habits is of core importance if you are going to have any yardstick as to what you are actually going to say, and deliver, to make them happy.

I still get blown away by the amount of big and small businesses who claim "customer centricity is our core" and haven't even spent a few hours mapping out who these actual people are.

2. Do you want to be truly measured?

Again, sniggers in the back row from people for even having the audacity to ask such a question. But, it's worth pointing out.

Your actual database size could go down substantially, because annoying people like me will actually look to see what is going on and suggest deleting records where a user hasn't opened an email in the past two years, or used that app that you dropped a hundred grand on.

We will actually be able to see not just whether the 5,000,000 likes equates to any precious activity in the form of clicks to website etc. But also, whether those people became leads and then customers.

Finally, the cool stuff may not actually produce the results, it may be the boring shite such as Google Adwords etc.

Be prepared for some inconvenient truths to come up as you transition from thinking you know what the landscape looks like, to truly knowing.

3. It is going to be hard work

This stuff isn't easy, there is a lot of creating, testing and refining. Multiple versions of creative across multiple channels takes time, effort and money. Customer journeys and content strategies are an ongoing process as you are constantly getting feedback of what's working or not. The good news is that the tools for this have been refined over the years and are geared up to tell you what the hell is going on in a sensible and actionable manner. We take our clients through a number of phases, always starting with what we call the "brilliant basics" first and foremost. Essentially, these are the quick wins that are simple to implement, but with the most impact on the business.

Sometimes, that is getting all the databases merged into one and then segmenting them properly using things such as the personas mentioned before. Just getting a Single Point of View of your customers is a genuine joy to behold and from there you can start simply - e.g. Segmentation of eDMs based on persona type, integrating your digital media to see which ones produce leads etc.

These all give you quick wins that enable the project to gain momentum and gear you up for future phases.

4. Watch out for flying cars

Now, please please please, be very careful when assessing all the technologies and partners available for the facilitation of the actual platform(s) you are going to use to drive this. This market is rapidly expanding and therefore is subject to the usual cool-cat crew jumping on board to try and make some easy dollars. Make sure you actually see real implementations and be mindful of cost of ownership of whatever platform you are looking for. Just as important is the implementation partner who is going to guide you through this whole process, make sure that they don't just show you some cool features of a canned demo that is impossible for your business to achieve in the short term. Simply put - "Customer centric communications" is just so hot right now and it can reap many rewards, but for shit's sake - watch out for spinmeisters and snake-oil merchants.

There is obviously a myriad of other pointers that I could punch through, but hopefully this gives you a bit to think about before embarking on such an exciting and rewarding journey for your customers and your business.