A business has to solve a need for an existing audience. If you don’t know who that customer is, or what your business can offer them, it may be difficult to get your business off the ground.

Making your business more client-centric

You’re far more likely to make sustainable sales, revenues and profits if you’re targeting your products and/or services to the needs of a very tailored group of customers. This ‘client-centric’ approach can be a gamechanger. In fact, recent research has shown that client-centric companies are 60% more profitable, compared to companies that are non-client-centric.

So, what can you do to refine your focus on your customers’ needs? Working through the following steps will help you become a more customer-centric and successful business.

To improve your client focus:

• Start with a pain and decide how to solve it – knowing your potential customers’ pain point, or their needs as a consumer or business, is the real starting point. Find out what people want and deliver it to them seamlessly for a good price. If you meet this need, make people’s lives easier or create a brand that people value, you’re setting the foundations for a stable and successful business model.
• Look out for the convenience opportunity – spotting an obvious opportunity in the market can often result in the germination of a great business idea. In essence, it’s about spotting the opportunity for convenience and bringing this solution to market for your chosen audience.
• Decide who your core audience will be – without a core customer profile, your marketing can become a process of slinging mud at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. However, by defining clear customer profiles, you can begin to understand your audience and make your marketing and promotion more targeted to their needs and wants.
• Do your customer and market research – knowing as much as possible about your customers is vital if you want to become more customer-centric. What interests do they have? What income bracket are they in? What do they think about your current products? Try engaging a market research company to run a customer focus group, or run your own online customer surveys. You could even run social media polls to understand your audience in more detail, or ask particular questions about customer needs.
• Tailor your offering to specific customer profiles – once you know WHO you’re selling to, you can begin to customise and tailor your products and/or services to your agreed customer profiles. If you’re a mobile sandwich business, find out what your office-based customers want to eat, what their favs are and how much they’re willing to spend on a daily lunch. This is all vital info when tailoring your offering to fill their customer needs in the most effective way. The more you can do to focus on the customer, the more aligned your business model will be to their expectations.

Becoming more customer-centric isn’t just a fashionable marketing trend. Putting the customer at the centre of your business strategy is now a critical part of driving your growth and profits.