The Secret of Digital Sales: Customer-Based Marketing

Customer-Based Marketing

“Most companies expect greater revenues from their online marketing efforts. However, not all of them succeed, as they usually fail to identify their key success factors and prioritize it.”

As a marketer who has been working in the digital marketing industry for nearly 10 years, I had many opportunities to consult for business owners and marketers from various companies in different industries. One thing many of them had missed is that they invested most of their time to find the best media channels or allocate their budget. Little do they know that their business success depends largely on targeting the right customers with great sales potential.

Aside from that, they usually strategize their campaign from a company perspective rather than doing customer-based marketing, which makes it less likely to produce great results as the customer needs haven’t been well assessed.

What is customer-based marketing?

It is a marketing strategy that starts with identifying your target customer, then crafting the right strategy based on the behaviors of your potential customers. This method could even start from product development, to sell products that solve the market needs.

To illustrate this customer-based marketing, imagine if you are running a business, selling healthy products, the elderly audience could be your main business growth driver. As a first priority, you will then need to analyse and gain your target customer insights first. This will ease your way out in making a better decision to develop new products that meet the real need of your target audience and formulate the right sales and marketing strategy that will captivate the elderly and get you ahead of the competition.

3 Secrets to success, ones you may have forgotten!

To craft your marketing strategy upon customer-based marketing, 3 steps should be followed;

1. Clearly define your target customer

Speaking of a clearly identified target customer, most marketers might say that they already have one and it’s something they always do before starting any campaign. Nonetheless, I personally have experienced greater success in companies that not only define target customers but create a Target Persona. It is a characteristic breakdown of your prospecting customer that further help the businesses proceed with the right marketing strategy.

Tip: Try researching tools such as Google Trend or Google Search Console to help you estimate the number of your potential customers based on specific keywords and assess sales opportunities before you actually make an investment decision.  

2. Consider what your customer “Need” rather than what they “Want”

Real customer’s needs are exactly the reason why people are buying your products. Therefore, identifying the “Need” of your target customers should always be prioritized before you start considering online marketing tools or media channels. A communication strategy that addresses real customer needs could generate a new demand among customers and provide a greater business opportunity. For this, businesses don’t wait for their customer to address their need nor make an assumption as to what they might want, they rightly identify it based on research and insights. 

The real “Need” could be assessed using social media, community websites, or even by seeing search trends of your target customers. This data point is an example of what your marketing strategy should be built around.

Tip: Understand your customers by reviewing platforms and community websites that they are on. It will help businesses to clearly comprehend customer pain points and craft a better communication strategy that reaches and wins customers’ hearts.

3. Don’t just exist, but always be present to your “Customer”

Being the first brand that comes to its customer minds is needless-to-say the ultimate goal of most brands. This is the right goal-orientation; however, many businesses have implemented the wrong approaches to gain the largest shares on online media without considering ROI. No matter how much effort and investment you put into online marketing, it won’t matter at all if you fail to be on the right touchpoint of your target customer.

To sum up, the key approach to succeed in customer-based marketing is to persistently create brand awareness at the right channel that your customers are on.

Tip: There are a lot of digital marketing tools that allow businesses to reach their target audience by Targeting Optimisation and AI Learning Optimisation on top-used media platforms such as Facebook, Google. Line, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and many other platforms that match different characters and sets of audiences.

Create a “Sales” strategy upon  past customer’s “Buying” behaviors

As I have mentioned, it is important to build your marketing strategy around your real customer behaviors with an objective to grow business through sales rather than brand awareness. To gain insights, one always needs to look back in hindsight, to consider the buying journey of past customers, a method they used to research for brands and products, a channel they decided to buy from, or a timeframe to which they had an interest until they made a purchase. These points of consideration should be well assessed for both before and after purchasing. With better insights, you can build a winning strategy for your future customers.

Tip: Don’t waste your time in creating a new strategy or repeat a campaign that you have yet to see success, as its performance has never been measured. Instead, you need to go back to these past performances and analyse your next step based on what has been proved. This is exactly how a failed campaign could turn into a successful one and a successful campaign could achieve even more, with data.

Essentially, in this year and the upcoming year 2021, there will be more fascinating digital marketing tools for all marketers to play with and elevate your campaign performance. However, I want all the business owners or marketers who’re reading this article to always keep in mind that revenue and business growth is the real metric of success. One should never make an assumption on what their customer “Might want” or “Might buy”, rather make their decision on what they “Need” based on real customer insights and data analysis.  

Heroleads, as a digital and e-commerce marketing expert, always does customer-based marketing strategy. We believe that by taking into account customer’s real needs, we are able to deliver campaign successes through rightly selected digital tools and the most suitable media channels that best reach target customers and convert them to sales. As such, we promise every partner to bring out your business growth.


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Adam Lahmuddin

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