Beyond The Hype: The Impact Of People-First Marketing And How To Implement It

Customer needs are constantly changing, demanding promotional strategies that can keep pace. Enter people-first marketing: a rising trend that has quickly evolved into an indispensable strategy. By putting your audience at the heart of your content, you can cultivate strong customer relationships and trigger better engagement for your business.

In this blog, we explore why people-first marketing is such an important part of your overall plan. We also share some invaluable insights on effectively integrating this approach into your content strategy. 

The importance of people-first marketing

Many businesses are still in the ‘product-centric’, rather than ‘people-centric’, mindset. They think about their marketing in terms of the product or service they offer, instead of revolving it around the customer that they help. But consumers are no longer willing to accept one-size-fits-all content – they want you to understand them individually. This means adopting a more human approach.

People-first marketing can transform your customer relationships for the better, driving engagement and building meaningful, personalised experiences. As well as greater resonance and long-term loyalty, it can lead to:

• Increased trust and credibility, with customers feeling your business aligns more with their values
• Better brand reputation, by showing that you can help your audience – whether through a solution to a problem or enabling them to reach their specific goals
• A difference in your market, distinguishing your business from competitors
• A higher chance of content that converts, and building a significantly stronger brand
• Other business benefits – from reduced price resistance to increased leads and customer lifetime value

Understanding your audience

To create a customer-centric strategy, you first need an in-depth understanding of who your audience is as well as their needs, preferences, and pain points. But you shouldn’t base this on what you think you know about your audience. You’ll need to carry out market research, create buyer personas, and collate informed insights. This way, you’ll learn key demographic and psychological factors that impact their behaviour.

By knowing their aspirations, motivations, and what triggers them to make purchasing decisions, you’ll be able to tailor your marketing strategies effectively. Plus, you’ll have more luck evoking a strong emotional reaction and developing authentic connections.

Creating tailored messaging

Armed with audience insights, you can then establish a customer journey that revolves around them – with the relevant types of content delivered via the right channels at the right time. The content itself should address those previously discussed pain points, and deliver solutions and applicable insights while remaining engaging. You’ll also need to ensure it’s tailored for the entire customer journey – from awareness to conversion and beyond.

Personalisation is crucial for people-first marketing, too. This can be in the form of:

• Birthday offers and discounts tailored to loyalty level
• Abandoned cart emails and suggested products based on previous behaviours
• Location-specific promotions and product recommendations based on local conditions
• One-to-one communications (like surveys, bespoke thank-you messages, and responding on social media)

Each can contribute to a strong customer-centric strategy that makes your audience feel understood and appreciated. 

Leveraging data and analytics

Data-driven marketing has a key role to play in this tailored messaging. It’ll allow you to make better informed decisions and fine-tune your strategies before they go live. Plus, you can identify patterns in your audience’s preferences, behaviours, and engagement so you can further segment them and deliver hyper-targeted communications.

What’s more, you can draw on data analytics to see what’s resonating with your audience, their favoured channels, and so on. But importantly, you can also measure the effectiveness of your campaigns for future optimisations…

Measuring success

Checking in on how your customer-centric strategy is doing involves monitoring critical key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer satisfaction, audience engagement levels, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value. This allows you to do more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn’t – tweaking the odd word here and there, polishing your approach, and triggering better customer experiences as a result.

And remember: this shouldn’t be a one-time thing but an always-on activity. You can continuously use data to understand how campaigns can be improved, as well as pass on those insights to other business departments – like sales, product development, and UX and UI design. 

Put people first with Making You Content

People-first marketing is a move towards forming stronger customer relationships and delivering higher value. It’s the future and it involves a lot of work – from research and implementation to measurement and re-implementation. But it doesn’t have to be hard work. 

Making You Content can assess your current market strategies, as well as create and distribute content that prioritises audience-centric approaches. Our team have done it successfully for other businesses, and we can do it for yours. Start the conversation with us to get the ball rolling.