Business-First vs Customer-First Marketing Programs

There’s a fairly simple concept in business that I believe most people would agree on; without customers, a business wouldn’t exist.

Despite customer’s being critical to a business’s sustainability, I’ve seen some brands build business-first marketing programs instead of customer-first marketing programs.

What do I mean by this?

These business-first marketing programs share a few characteristics in common:

• They prioritize marketing tactics which are easily measurable. This often takes the form of search and direct response paid social.

• These programs prioritize short term goals like lead volume instead of focusing on revenue and other down-stream metrics.

• Many of the buyer touchpoints designed by these programs are geared toward booking a meeting and making a sale instead of building trust & authority without any sort of meeting request.

While each of these practices may seem reasonable on the surface, the challenge that I’ve found is that these don’t align well with actual customer behavior based on my third party research and first party analyses. Ironically enough, when a marketing program is designed using business-first principles, I’ve seen the business actually suffer because these practices don’t translate well to actual revenue.

In comparison, customer-first marketing programs often share common attributes like:

• Prioritizing marketing tactics that help buyers to understand the product or service, without directly asking for a sale or meeting. These efforts aren’t always easily measurable.

• Focusing on building long-term pipeline through awareness/demand gen efforts even though these might result in short-term losses.

• Designing buyer touchpoints to focus on building trust and authority with potential customers instead of always including a hard ask for a sale or meeting.

I’ve written about this a few times, but buyers typically conduct a decent amount of research before making a purchase design. Expecting someone to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars based on one or two interactions is likely going to lead to disappointing marketing performance.

This is why I work with my clients to design marketing and paid media programs that build multiple touchpoints into a common buyer journey.

While I lean on data and testing to make many decisions, I’ve found an easy gut check to determine whether or not a tactic is business-first or customer-first is to ask, “Does this actually help a potential buyer to understand what we do and why it’s valuable?”

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.