Customer-Centric Marketing for Small Businesses

marketing

Oct 13

The blog is for creative business owners who want to grow their businesses online. I’ll be sharing blog posts that cover an aspect of digital marketing for creatives, whether you sell products or services. It’s a marketing pep talk if you will.

I’ll be talking about all things SEO, marketing funnels, advertising, email marketing, or mindset around marketing. Each post will encourage and inspire you with actionable tips: sans marketing jargon.

As marketers, we spend a lot of time thinking about getting those first customers in, and how we can get as many eyes on our products as possible. But what if the quantity of customers matters less than the quality? And is customer satisfaction and retention more important than the number of customers?

In this post, we’ll be covering…

Customer retention
Lifetime value
The Customer Journey
Purchase motivators

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Keeping Your Customers

Are you focused on getting orders or getting customers?

“Menekse, that’s the same thing.”

Well, I hear you - but there’s a significant difference.

Getting an order is a single act in a single moment of time. Getting a customer has the potential for multiple acts across a period of time.

When we start out in business, we can often focus on getting more orders: after all, orders = money, and money pays the bills.

But.

Because of this, we can miss out on the most incredible opportunities with people who have already bought from our brands.

Have you ever heard the acronym “LTV”?

It stands for “lifetime value”, and it’s the amount of money a customer is likely to go on to spend with your business once they’ve bought from you.

Focusing on lifetime value instead of individual orders makes us much more comfortable with investing in marketing, whether investing money in paid advertising or investing time in search engine optimisation.

This is because we understand that the cost of acquiring a customer is a one-time thing and that customers can go on to buy from us 6-8 times over the course of a specified amount of time.

It might cost £10 to get an order, which can feel scary if the order is for £25 because 40% of your profit is gone. But if someone places four orders with you over the course of a year? You have spent £10 to acquire a customer worth £100, taking the cost down to 10%.

What does this look like in practice?

Ideally, we want to have 20-30% of customers coming back to buy from us each month.

You can calculate your customer’s lifetime value for a period of time with the following process:

Firstly, divide your total revenue by the number of orders to get your average order value.

Then, you divide the total number of orders by unique customers to get the average orders per customer.

Finally, you multiply your average orders per customer by your average order value.

Setting up Google Analytics will also give you some insight into your LTV.

If someone places an order with you today, would they make another purchase? Do you have marketing in place that will bring them back for more?

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The Customer Journey

Have you ever come across the concept of the customer journey? It’s the psychological journey your potential customers go through to get to the point where they are ready to make a purchase.

It’s made up of five main stages:

Awareness
Interest
Consideration
Purchase
Retention

Some people make it longer, and others shorten it, but these five steps cover it well.

Depending on what kind of business you run, this journey can be rapid or much longer.

For instance, the purchase journey for survival needs like food is much quicker than for an emotional need that fulfils a status ambition (like designer clothing) or creative expression (like interiors and art).

When doing keyword research, we want to understand what each stage of the customer journey looks like for our business.

One of the biggest challenges for lots of creative business owners when it comes to researching the customer journey is the fact that for most of us, our business is providing a “nice to have” rather than a survival need. So we struggle with the idea of communicating our businesses in a way that fulfils “need”.

But want is just as powerful a purchase motivator; it may take slightly longer for the purchase to happen!

When creating content, be it for search engine visibility or when talking to our audiences across email and social media, we want to ensure we address each stage of the customer journey.

If you’re spending too long on the “Awareness” and “Interest” stages, you’re not likely to have a very high conversion rate. But if you’re spending too much time asking people to make a purchase, you may not be demonstrating your value in a way that moves your audience through to the purchase stage.

What parts of the customer journey are you focusing on too much? What about too little? Let me know in the comments or over on Instagram!