Customer-guided marketing: is yours?

In the marketing department, starting with the customer seems so obvious it goes without saying. Unfortunately, more often than not, it goes without doing, too.

We start every major project with interviews with real customers (or prospects). Face to face or on the phone. The few times we’ve skipped this step, due to time constraints or client reticence, we’ve regretted it.

In these interviews, customers tell us critically important things:

• Their biggest challenges and how they experience them
• Where it hurts, where it itches and where it feels just fine
• What words they use to describe their world
• How open they’d be to a solution and how it ought to look

We then use this insight to shape the offer, guide our copywriting and prove that we understand our customer’s world. It’s obvious, it’s powerful and it’s all-too-rarely practiced.

If interviews with real customers don’t change your marketing, your messages and your campaigns, you’re not listening hard enough.