Marketing professionals know the importance of adjusting their methods to respond to marketplace changes. User-centered marketing — also called people-centered or human-centered — is a prime example of doing that. It involves keeping your audience at the heart of every decision and showing them you have solutions to support their aspirations and needs.
1. Shows Empathy
The most successful companies build connections with their customers. They develop messaging that conveys how they understand the challenges people face and want to help them overcome obstacles. User-centered marketing can make you excel at demonstrating empathy.
One effective approach to take is to create your campaigns around helping your customers. Don’t take a mindset that they are just faceless individuals that will help drive your conversions. The audience will pick up on that and likely switch to companies that make prioritize empathy. User-centered marketing shows you’ve tuned into their needs and want to ease the associated struggles.
2. Allows More Effective Calls to Action
The broad purpose of a sales funnel is to give people content that encourages them to take desirable actions and eventually boost your bottom line. However, many marketers overlook the fact that a visually appealing sales funnel could be especially useful. For example, you can focus on simple layouts for your landing pages, plus make your design choices reflect the stage of the buyer’s journey.
The call-to-action is also a crucial part of your sales funnel. You can enhance it by pursuing user-centered marketing. In one study, researchers found that personalized CTAs converted 202% better than ones without them. You can also improve results by determining what matters most to your audience. Would they prefer a complimentary month of service or 30% off the purchase price?
3. Avoids Customer Mistrust
You can probably think of at least a few brands that were immersed in public perception nightmares after news broke that caused people to lose trust. It can be difficult to reverse negative feelings in consumers. The ideal scenario is to show customers that you have them in mind and want to — and will — do everything you can to nurture trust. People-centered marketing makes that situation more likely to happen.
When you pay attention to what your customers care about the most, it’s easier to avoid mistakes. For example, maybe survey results found more than half of your audience wants to know how your business uses data. In that case, you could double down on transparency instead of keeping people in the dark — and possibly making them think badly of your company.
4. Provides Hyperlocal Marketing Opportunities
Hyperlocal marketing happens when companies target small segments of their overall audiences. For example, instead of sending an offer to everyone in a state or city, they might only give it to people in a certain ZIP code. By using location data across geographic areas, marketers can generate helpful maps that show untapped parts of the market most likely to increase profits.
Investing in user-centered marketing allows brands to tailor their content for people in particular income ranges. It can also let them experiment with hyperlocal marketing by distributing offers to people in defined neighborhoods. Taking that approach gives marketers a better idea about whether sufficient interest exists within households in individual communities. Then, they can ensure the maximum outcomes for location-based efforts.
5. Makes the Marketing Budget More Effective
Getting confirmation of your marketing budget for the year is an important milestone, but an early one. The next thing to work out is how you’ll make it stretch as far as possible by using the money wisely. Looking at your target audience through people-centered marketing is an excellent way forward.
Everyone loves freebies, and promotional merchandise can get the word out about your business as people naturally use the goodies you give them. You can conclude whether people would be more likely to use — and appreciate — a branded drink cooler or calendar. Finding out what humans want is a valid marketing goal no matter how you spend your budget, whether on advertising or social media customer engagement campaigns.
6. Increases Your Content’s Reach
Some pieces of content quickly get thousands of views, while others largely go unnoticed. Learning about user-centric marketing could help your material more frequently fall into the first category. If you publish things that interest your readers and relate to the challenges they face, the approach could mean getting more clicks, shares and brand recognition.
Make human-centering marketing work for you by crafting the content so that readers can see a person with a genuine perspective wrote it — not someone who merely regurgitates the brand’s principles and practices in a robotic tone. The writer still acts as a representative of the brand but does not lose their authentic voice. Inserting personal stories into the content is smart since it makes the material more relatable and memorable.
7. Improves the Customer Experience
Research indicates that people at every level of a company must work together to enhance the customer experience. Although the sales team signs people up for product subscriptions, it’s customer service or tech support that likely assists them in resolving any issues that arise. Studies also show that people appreciate consistency and personalization. Those factors can make them more likely to stick with a company rather than looking elsewhere.
User-centric marketing can become part of the experiences people have while at your website, shopping in a store or talking to someone associated with the company. Research to see what characteristics of your brand consumers like most and do everything you can to make those facets stand out during each interaction. You want people to know what to expect when dealing with your brand, and user-centered marketing can help show them.
User-Centered Marketing Is Worth Your Effort
You cannot succeed in people-centered marketing overnight, but taking your time should pay off. After all, the goal is to cater to your customers. The more you learn about them and adapt your operations accordingly, the easier it’ll be to make your marketing tactics resonate with the audience — leading to more profitability and customer satisfaction.
Lexie is a web designer and digital nomad. She enjoys kayaking with her goldendoodle and baking new cookie recipes. Check out her design blog, Design Roast, and connect with her on Twitter @lexieludesigner.