Customer-centric Marketing

This one idea – that the customer’s experience is the first, last, and primary consideration, and that all strategy and tactics serve their (the customer’s) priorities – is the premise of most of the trends we’ll mention here. Take mobile, for instance. A major trend, for sure. But it’s vitally important because people simply use mobile devices more than they use desktops now. Making your messaging and services mobile-friendly (if not mobile first) is smart because it serves customers’ needs better. Then there’s the trend of personalization – again, another symptom of customer-centric marketing.

The Rise of Mobile Usage

Personalization, clearly, puts the customer’s needs and preferences first. Same goes with account-based marketing, too. It’s just another aspect of customer-centric, aka “customer first” marketing. This applies again to video. That’s a trend because – you guessed it – people like to watch videos. We’ll look at each of these trends individually of course, but this might be the one question you have to ask yourself if you want to be cutting-edge in 2018: Does this tactic/channel/campaign serve the customer’s needs first? Of course, while we want to put the customer’s needs first, we also have to stay in business.

Balancing Customer Needs with Business Goals

But often, business initiatives or practices have been set up for the benefit of the company, while keeping the customers “happy enough.” We may all have to flip that around in this coming year, and the years to come. It may become necessary to do things that delight customers, while we keep the business needs (profit, mainly) “happy enough.” This reminds me a bit of Amazon in earlier years … like around 2000. Remember when people were joking about “Amazon.org” because Bezos kept investing in making Amazon better and better and better, profits be damned? Most of his investors were pulling their hair out, but Bezos kept building his platform … kept building for the customer.