The Power of Customer-Centric Messaging
Discover how customer-centric messaging can significantly boost your business growth. Explore effective strategies for aligning messaging with customer needs to enhance revenue and brand engagement.
With an ongoing buzz about customer experience impacting business growth, you’re probably aware targeted messaging is one of the most important tactics for connecting with your audience. According to a survey of 180 B2B companies by the Strategic Account Management Association and Vantage Partners, those that reported a “very mature” level of customer-centric commitment experienced 2.5 times the revenue growth, compared to those that reported their company was “very immature” in its focus on customer experience. At the same time, maintaining a concentrated effort on customer-centric messaging often involves a significant investment of time and resources. It is no easy feat. In 2023, Forrester reported the Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) dropped for the second consecutive year.
So how do you stay on top of this challenge? We ask clients to look at every customer interaction through customer journey mapping and customer-centric message development. While messaging is only part of the equation, it’s a critical piece of delivering a stronger customer experience. Good messaging aligns your brand and offerings with your customer needs and wants. The process of developing that messaging can help you find points of differentiation that customers will notice.
What is Customer-Centric Messaging?
Customer-centric messaging resonates with customers by speaking to their most important needs using terms they relate to. It means you understand:
- Who your customers are
- What their needs are
- Which communication channels they prefer
- When to reach out to them
- How to speak using their terminology
When Do You Need to Revamp Your Messaging?
It’s important to keep an ongoing pulse on your messaging strategy and regularly review key messages. Sometimes, simply updating your messaging is adequate. In other cases, you may need a more in-depth overhaul or strategy session. The following situations signal a need to examine your messaging (and sometimes your offerings and processes, too).
- Your customers don’t understand your product/service or how to use it
- Changes in the marketplace (new technology, innovation, competition) are affecting how your company and products are perceived
- Your company has merged with or acquired another organization
- You are launching new products or services
- Your customers’ needs have changed
- Sales are lagging or your sales and marketing teams are not aligned
- You are rebranding your organization
If you are facing any of these challenges, we suggest holding a messaging strategy session. It can illuminate differences in how you think you are perceived versus how your customers perceive your company, products or services. This can also help you define a desired future state of how you want to be perceived and then identify changes you will need to make to get there.
Participants should include representatives from your sales, marketing, customer service and HR departments along with others that interact with customers or develop or test products that directly touch customers.
How Can a Customer-Centric Messaging Strategy Session Help?
Getting Started
With collective experience designing marketing campaigns for hundreds of organizations, we’ve honed our processes for message development. Common components are described below, but we often customize our process to meet client needs. In many situations, we recommend research first to help clients understand customer needs, unmet needs, questions and perceptions. Our proprietary AI-powered Mindset Analysis Process℠ (MAP) research offers a quick and economical solution for getting a true pulse on the market.
Strategy Summit
Our process includes a strategy summit where we go through a progressive series of exercises to gain understanding of your market, audience, competitive environment and perceptions. Next, we look at customers’ top issues, your solutions, the added value you offer and proof points to demonstrate this. The output: We add all this up to design a unique selling proposition and messaging platform that differentiates your organization from the competition.
Examples for Inspiration
See the results of some of our recent messaging work for yourself. Our messaging strategy session was a pivotal piece of our rebranding work for Wolter, a rapidly growing material handling and logistics equipment company. In another instance, our the session was the springboard to rebrand Wausau Equipment, a leading manufacturer of municipal snow removal equipment. With a more consistent look and customer-centric messaging, the company relaunched its solutions at a major trade event.
Need help creating customer-centric messaging? We’d love to guide you through our process. Contact us today to start the conversation.
About the Author
With more than a couple of decades of marketing experience, Lisa Robbins has worked in almost every vertical. From health insurance, education, medical devices and recipe clubs to utilities, foundries and industrial equipment manufacturers, the range of products, people and strategic solutions is diverse. She still loves the challenge of learning all about a client’s business and mapping out a creative plan to help them reach their goals. Starting as a writer and public relations strategist, Lisa sees every client’s situation as an opportunity to discover something new. She enjoys sharing her knowledge and collaborating to create winning campaigns. In that same spirit, as an avid yoga practitioner and certified instructor she frequently offers lunchtime yoga sessions for anyone who wants to join a class.
