Customer Oriented Growth Strategies: 11 Hacks to do it Right

With more than 60% of consumers finding customers experience an important factor (irrespective of price), it becomes all the more crucial for your business to look into substantial customer-oriented marketing strategies.

That means you need to make customer needs and happiness your top priority.

It can become a painstaking process for managers and even for business owners like you. And it may lead you to think if it’s really necessary to take such measures.

Well, it is. You need to realize that 73% of customers claim that the key factor of their loyalty to your brand is the quality of their experience with your brand.

That gives you all the more reason to be more customer-oriented and create strategies that assist you to be more vigilant towards their growing needs and expectations. So, to help you handle the process of building a sustainable customer-oriented growth strategy, we’ve prepared a list of essential tips that you should rely on in this important business endeavor.

Read on and find out what you should do to get the most out of your business transformation.

Customer Oriented Growth Strategies: Ideas to Do It Right

Businesses find customer-oriented growth strategies their #1 priority. That’s because most of you have understood that keeping customer happiness your top priority can help your business earn loyalty and long-term relationship with the existing base.

In this section, we aim to talk about 11 different customer-oriented growth strategies that will help your business boost customer delight rate efficiently.

#1. Define the Type of Your Growth Strategy

To be able to establish a sustainable consumer-oriented marketing strategy, you should first define what type of growth you want to achieve with it. If you only know you want your business bigger, and have no precise idea of the ways to make it happen, you’ll likely fail. 

So, before moving on to some more specific tips, let’s first check out different types of growth that make an impact on the way you choose to create your consumer-oriented marketing strategy. Your growth can be based on:

1. Market penetration, which is succeeded if you achieve to sell larger amounts of your products to your current customers;
2. Market development, which includes expanding your business to new markets and customers (opening new regional stores, globally expanding e-commerce, etc.);
3. Product development, which represents a great way of obtaining positive publicity and increasing new customers’ interest;
4. Acquisition, which practically makes you obtain new customers by purchasing your competitors’ business and is usually reserved for big and already well-established businesses;
5. Diversification, which happens when you enter new markets by introducing new lines of products to fulfill customers’ needs that you previously didn’t use to address before.

#2. Consider Customer Segmentation

Once you’ve realized which one of the listed strategies your business is trying to implement, you can move on to analyzing its impact on your customers to create an effective consumer-oriented marketing strategy. 

Now, to be able to meet their expectations, you should get to know them better. And you can do it by analyzing their structure and preferences, as well as the potential differences that may exist among your most prominent target groups of customers. 

However, to reliably create your primary buyer personas, you should have a highly organized system of collecting, classifying and filtering data about them. In this process, customer service software can be a great help as numerous well-developed solutions of this type offer the option of storing and managing customers’ profiles highly efficiently. 

#3. Make Use of Social Media

Social media platforms definitely are some of the most efficient ways for you to build a consumer-oriented marketing strategy. Not only can you learn more about your followers, but you also get a chance of interacting with them on a daily basis.

Now, communicating about all that matters to them regarding your products or services, you also obtain valuable hints for the further development of your growth strategy. 

All you have to do is learn to actively listen to them and pay attention to their comments and messages. Those can directly indicate not only your advantages but also your customers’ pain points and critical areas that you may need to improve to keep them happy.

#4. Create the Content Your Customers Need

Like we’ve already mentioned, you can find out a lot about your customers’ opinions and preferences using social media. And once you obtain these pieces of information, do your best to create content that they will want to use. Moreover, to be sure you’re doing it the right way, give them something they really need.

While purely fun content (like memes or gifs) may appear more engaging and appealing to your customers in the short run, in the long run, they will appreciate something educational and inspiring. Accordingly, try to offer something that will help them get the most out of your product or service.

So, when creating the content for your brand (no matter whether it’s for your website or social media), make sure to find the right balance between the content they may want to consume for fun and the content that they actually need to enhance their benefits from your product. This way, you’ll make sure to provide real value that will keep them coming back to you. 

#5. Use Online Surveys to Get Their Opinions

Sometimes, your customers’ activity on your social media pages won’t be enough for you to figure out their impressions or opinions to analyze them more profoundly. That’s why you should send customer satisfaction surveys after the support process comes to an end. 

You can send a survey once a ticket gets resolved. As your final email, you can send these surveys to your customers and ask for their feedback. You can even send an NPS score scale or a normal scored survey in the email that will look something like this:

But make sure that your survey is more well-thought and concise. It would help you collect accurate customer feedback, ratings, and impressions on your brand. Not only would it be reliable but also help you work on improving your services as per the growing expectations of the customers. In a nutshell, you can improve the customer experience with your brand hassle-free.

#6. Keep Track of the Value You Provide to Them

If you expect to create an effective consumer-oriented marketing strategy, you must be aware of everything that you provide them to gain their loyalty. Accordingly, only if you’re fully aware of all the benefits your brand brings to your customers, you can use them to enhance your marketing and stimulate business growth.

So, once you’ve defined everything that you offer and contrasted it to your customers’ needs and expectations, you should create a balanced scorecard. 

This important tool for strategy performance management will let you communicate your goals among your teams, align their work with your growth strategy, and measure and monitor your progress as you try to build a more customer-oriented culture. 

Most importantly, based on your scorecard KPIs, you’ll get to understand how your customers position the provided value compared to the price they pay for it. And that’s the essence of customer-oriented business.

#7. Personalize Your Communication

Another customer-oriented marketing strategy you should work upon is to personalize your communication with customers. Let your operators know that creating a personal vibe with customers is essential for keeping them hooked to your brand.

Irrespective of the medium you choose, make sure your support team has all the data in hand to create a customized experience for every individual customer. For this, you can use tools like live chat or a help desk ticketing software that help you capture valuable data on customer behavior, decisions, and expectations.

Recommended Read: Best Help Desk Software for 2023

The availability of such data at your disposal, you can:

• Use customers’ names while you interact with them,
• Refer to their previous requests to check if they were successfully resolved,
• Gauge at data like their age, occupation, location and other collected info to adjust your tone, etc.

These factors will help your support agents create a personalized experience for all customers.

#8. Organize Customer Service Training for Your Staff

If you’re wondering how to build a sales team from the ground up and make it an essential part of your customer-oriented growth strategy, there are several tips you should have in mind. You should:

• Hire open-minded, friendly people who are easy to talk to, 
• Make them realize the importance of your customers’ experience,
• Provide them with customer-oriented training that will increase their competence,
• Equip them with reliable customer service software to let them provide impeccable customer experience (make sure that it has a customer service ticketing system to help you handle all requests more efficiently).

#9. Make Your Customers Feel Appreciated

A well-designed consumer-oriented marketing strategy is supposed to make your customers comfortable with your brand representatives. 

To provide this ambiance that will make your customers stay loyal, apart from having their issues timely addressed, your team should check up on them and show appreciation to them. But how should you do it? Well, even though it may seem complex, actually, there are some simple yet great ways to do so. You can:

• Tell them to say thank you by sending them an email or a postcard, 
• Send them birthday cards (maybe with a voucher or a symbolic gift?)
• Organize special meet-ups with testing for your loyal and most valuable customers, etc.

#10. Pay More Attention to Customer Retention

This rhyme should actually be the cornerstone of your business. Not only does the customer retention cost less than the acquisition of new customers, but it also provides increased stability to your business. With loyal customers that keep coming back to your business, you can be sure to always have a healthy, reliable base for your further growth. 

So, no matter how important it is for you to expand your business or attract new customers, don’t forget to keep an eye on your existing customers, and listen to their needs and requests. If you listen to them carefully, their suggestions may also be an incredibly valuable source of tips and help you increase the number of customers. 

#11. Make Your Entire Organization Familiar With Your Customers

Last but not least, to be able to create a well-performing consumer-oriented marketing strategy, you should present your customers as your most important stakeholder to all of your staff members.

While it’s true that your customer service is the main factor directly impacting your customers’ experience (together with your products or services) you definitely shouldn’t think that the rest of your business departments has no relevance for your customer satisfaction. 

So, if you’re wondering how to build customer satisfaction from scratch, and you want to do it right, you should not invest only in your customer service software or support staff training. On the contrary, you should consider your business as a whole that should be entirely oriented towards your clients, and make it possible for all your employees to understand that. 

This way, you will all be united around the same goal, which is keeping your customers happy, and, accordingly, stay focused on your business mission.

Wrapping Up: A Customer-Oriented Growth Strategy Is Your Essential Business Need

In the market era that promotes customer satisfaction and empowering, a customer-oriented strategy is not a simple advantage but a necessity if you want your business to succeed. So, try not to risk your business performance just because you’re used to some old-fashioned, traditional ways of doing business. 

The constant changes will require you not only to switch from traditional support systems to customer service software but also to change the way your staff sees your business. 

You have to make them understand that their top priority should be keeping your customers satisfied. And in the modern market conditions, this is succeeded by: 

• having them in mind when discussing your new growth strategy
• training your support staff to provide an impeccable customer service
• performing a thorough segmentation of your target audience
• relying on the advantages of the online world (including social media, online surveys, personalized real-time interaction via customer service software, etc.)
• offering the value, they need (both in terms of products and services and the content you create to keep them engaged)

Finally (and most importantly), you should also remember those who represent the cornerstone of your business success. And those are your loyal customers. So, don’t forget to include them in your growth strategy, as making your loyal customers feel appreciated and rewarding them for their loyalty can only increase your business stability and additionally improve your business results. 

Now that we’ve seen how customer-oriented growth strategies can help your business work towards customer satisfaction let’s take a look at some of the frequently asked questions below.

Q1. How Do You Create a Customer-Oriented Strategy?

To create a customer-oriented strategy, you need to make sure that you should:

• Work towards customer empathy,
• Hire people who can understand your customer’s pain-points better and come up with actionable steps, 
• Have people who can understand customer insights better,
• Connect the employee culture improvement to delighted customers to have better outcomes for your business

Q2. Which Tools Can Help You Create Customer Oriented Marketing Strategy?

You basically need tools that help you capture data on your customers to create a substantial customer-oriented marketing strategy. These are inclusive of:

• Help desk ticketing software
• Live chat software
• Google Analytics
• Knowledgebase
• Customer relationship management tool

Q3. How Do You Become Customer Oriented?

To become customer-oriented, you first need to get a good grasp of what customers really want and whether they find your business to be a complete package for their needs. Once you know this, next up is to focus towards training your team and yourself to:

• Listen and understand the voice of the customer
• Define what standards should be set during different scenarios
• Understand which scenario would require further escalation and which wouldn’t
• Work in complete harmony with other departments to resolve customer’s problems faster

Q4. What Is Customer Gap? and How Do You Explain It Under Customer-Oriented Strategy?

The customer gap is defined to be the difference between customer’s perception and their expectations towards the service provider. However, the two are very much identical in the ideal world. When the customer gap is seen within the customer-oriented strategy, the strategy maker aims to close the gap between customer expectations and perceptions by understanding the needs and providing the best possible.