Helping your team feel close to customers is vital to the success of your organization.
Not only will it improve your coworkers’ satisfaction and engagement in their work, but it will also allow each of them to make decisions that support the needs and wants of your customers.
This is especially true for your marketing team. Marketers need to understand who your customers are, how they think, and what they want before the team can effectively grow your brand and communicate with your customer base.
Here’s how to build a customer centric marketing team in 3 simple steps!
Develop a customer centric team with surveys
Learn how you can use surveys to help your entire team feel closer to customers.
1. Let customers be your marketers
Give your marketers access to the latest and greatest feedback from your customers. This can be done via email or with a shared page that you can continually update over time.
It’ll help them understand how your customers benefit from your product/service, plus these anecdotes and data points can be your most effective forms of advertising.
According to research by Northwestern, nearly every consumer (95%) reads customer reviews online before they make a purchasing decision. Clearly, people value customer opinions. For marketers, this means that proactively sharing positive client stories—with customers and prospects—can help sell additional products and services.
Need help creating customer proof points?
TechValidate can help you collect and publish testimonials, case studies, statistics, and more!
2. Ensure that your marketers provide internal transparency
A customer centric marketing team shares their activities with other departments. Why? Because customers expect— and want—them to!
According to Salesforce, 70% of customers expect their salespeople to know which marketing campaigns they’ve seen. This makes sense when you think about it: Say a customer received an email that promotes a specific product/service. The sales rep should only follow up with the customer by talking about that product/service. If they try to promote a different one or focus on another subject altogether, the customer can easily get annoyed.
Other teams can also improve your customer experience if they understand what your marketers are up to. For example, imagine that your marketing team writes a bunch of great case studies that can help customers discover more ways to use your product/service. If colleagues in other departments are aware of these case studies, they can share them with their own social networks—giving your case studies a chance to reach a wider audience.
You can keep the rest of your organization up to speed on your team’s marketing activities by:
- Sending bi-weekly/monthly email updates
- Including marketing updates as part of the agenda for recurring, company-wide meetings
- Adding a marketing update section onto a site that any employee can access
3. Build a customer centric marketing team from the ground up
A customer centric marketing team only exists when it’s made up of selfless individuals who truly care about the customer experience.
You can proactively recruit marketers who have these personal attributes by simply asking a few questions during the hiring process. Your questions can include:
- What motivates you to work hard?
- How do you define success in your career?
- What do you consider when working through a challenge?
If their answers to any of these questions involve customers, then you know you have a customer centric marketer on your hands!
Pick the best initiatives by measuring your marketers’ customer centricity
Our tips for improving your customer centric marketing aren’t necessarily applicable to every situation.
To see which of our ideas are relevant, and to help you identify additional ones, try surveying your marketers using our customer centricity survey template. We recommend that you run this survey consistently, every 3-6 months. That way, you’ll be able to evaluate the impact your ideas have once they’re implemented, and you’ll be able to spot new ones over time.
A customer centric marketing team is more likely to be happy with their work and delight your customers. So take the time to measure—and strengthen—their relationship with customers. Once you do, everyone stands to win.
