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Today’s B2B buyers are increasingly less interested in a product’s technical features, specifications, and functionality and are instead engaged by customer-centric messaging which focuses on how your product can solve their myriad problems and help them reach their goals. Shifting from product-centric to customer-centric messaging is critical, especially because 86% of buyers say they’re more likely to consider a brand if it demonstrates a deep understanding of their needs.
What is Product-Centric and Customer-Centric Messaging?
Product-Centric Messaging
Product-centric messaging focuses on the product’s features and specifications, especially regarding unique capabilities or technology. For example, product-centric messaging for cloud storage might spotlight information like: “Featuring 1TB of storage, 256-bit encryption, and 99.9% uptime.” In other words, it tells the consumer what the product is but fails to explain why these features matter to the buyer. While product-centric messaging is important, nearly 90% of buyers say satisfactory customer experience, beginning with customer-centric messaging, matters as much as the products or services a business offers.
Customer-Centric Messaging
Customer-centric messaging still includes the important product features but frames them as solutions to real-world problems. Using the same cloud storage example, customer-centric messaging might say: “Keep your data secure with 256-bit encryption and store up to 1TB of information so you never have to worry about running out of space again. With 99.9% uptime, your team can access files anytime, anywhere, ensuring business continuity.” In other words, this type of messaging leads with the customer’s pain points, challenges, and goals, emphasizes the ways in which the product solves specific challenges, and focuses on outcomes for the consumer, like increased efficiency, cost savings, or improved performance.
In Short: The Key Differences
The main differences between product-centric and customer-centric messaging can be found in how both the product and the deliverable value are presented.
- Product-Centric: Focuses on what the product is, prioritizes the product’s features and specifications, and highlights the product’s capabilities.
- Customer-Centric: Focuses on what the product does for the customer, prioritizes customer challenges and solutions, and emphasizes how the product impacts the customer’s goals.
Why B2B Buyers Expect Customer-Centric Messaging
B2B buyers are no longer focused on the technical specifications of a product. Instead, they expect businesses to speak directly to their challenges, priorities, and long-term objectives. By employing customer-centric messaging, businesses demonstrate to customers that they value customer voice and participation in the buying relationship.
The Rise of Informed Buyers
The wealth of information online enables today’s B2B buyers to conduct between 57% and 70% of the buying process before they contact sales. These buyers no longer need to rely on companies to tell them what the product is; instead, they want to know how it can help them with their specific needs. In this way, your messaging should guide them towards solutions, not features.
New Decision-Making Process
B2B buyers are increasingly focusing on the bigger picture and the ways in which what they buy will contribute to their success and address their pain points. In fact, 73% of B2B buyers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. In other words, B2B buyers no longer want to be sold to in the traditional sense; instead, they want to partner with companies who understand their needs in order to achieve measurable results.
Increased Competition
With so many similar products on the market, it can be hard for businesses to differentiate their product(s) on features alone. Instead, demonstrated value has become a key differentiator between products in a saturated market. By tailoring your messaging to the customer’s needs and goals, you not only separate yourself from the competition but also make it easier for the customer to see why they should choose your solution over others on the market.
Key Steps to Create Value-Driven Customer-Centric Messaging
These steps can turn the seemingly daunting task of shifting from product-centric to customer-centric messaging into a transformative approach to connect with your customers on a more meaningful level.
Conduct Deep Customer Research
The core of customer-centric messaging is a deep understanding of your audience, their behaviors, preferences, goals, and challenges. Customer research provides insights to help you craft compelling, personalized messaging for your audience.
Collect insights through:
- Customer Interviews or direct conversations with your customers to identify what they value most, their biggest challenges, and how your product fits.
- Surveys and Feedback Forms that provide quantitative data on customer preferences and experiences.
- Data Analytics through CRM systems, website behavior data, or other analytics platforms that provide insight into customer behaviors and trends.
- Social Listening or monitoring social media to see what kinds of issues your target audience is discussing.
From these insights, you can develop buyer personas that represent the varying segments of your customer base and to which groups you can tailor your messaging to address their unique needs. Businesses that use personas in their marketing strategy enjoy a 73% higher conversion rate than those that don’t. Using data and insights is also important because it precipitates:
- Increased Personalization which can boost engagement rates by more than 20%.
- Improved Engagement which can make your tailored marketing efforts almost twice as effective as non-tailored marketing.
- Better Decision-Making which enables you to make informed decisions about how to adjust your messaging based on what’s working or what’s not.
By deeply knowing who your customer is and their needs, goals, and challenges, you can more thoughtfully craft messaging that demonstrates your product’s value to them. In other words, you can frame the features or specifications of your product in a way that highlights the benefits it provides the customer.
Map Customer Needs to Your Product’s Value
The key here is to translate each product feature into tangible value for the customer. Instead of listing your product’s features, describe the ways in which those features solve the problems your customers are facing.
For example, if your product is software for project management, rather than saying “Our platform integrates with 50+ apps.”, say “Integrate seamlessly with your favorite tools to streamline workflows and save time.” In this way, your audience can immediately identify the ways in which your product mitigates some of their common pain points.
To help, ask yourself the following questions about each product feature:
- What problem does this feature solve for my customer?
- How does this feature make my customer’s life easier or more efficient?
- What outcome does this feature help achieve?
By focusing on providing and highlighting value-driven solutions, you can ensure that your messaging speaks directly to what your customers care about. Customers want to know how your product can make their lives easier, save them time and money, or improve efficiency. Positioning your product as a solution to these unique problems not only demonstrates an understanding of your customer but also creates impactful messaging.
Personalize Your Communication Across Channels
Customer-centric messaging also means that you recognize that different customers may be at different stages in the buyer’s journey. Personalization, therefore, should extend across multiple channels, including email campaigns, website content, and social media, and meet them where they are in that journey. For the different stages in the buyer’s journey, consider tailoring your messaging in the following ways:
- Awareness Stage: Deliver educational content that maintains a focus on addressing the customer’s problems. For example, “Discover how inefficient workflows could be costing your business time and money.”
- Consideration Stage: Offer comparisons or insights into how your product addresses their specific needs. For example, “See how our project management software reduces delays by 30%.”
- Decision Stage: Highlight clear and measurable outcomes. For example, “Join the 500+ businesses that have improved project delivery times by using our software.”
In each of these examples, you provide personalization at whatever stage the buyer is in. You can additionally personalize depending on which buyer persona you’re addressing. For example, if you are tailoring your messaging to CFOs, you might focus on ROI, cost savings, and financial benefits or if you’re addressing Operations leaders, you might emphasize efficiency improvements, time savings, and team collaboration.
Additionally, to truly resonate with your customer, you need to speak their language. This means that you should avoid overly complex or jargon-filled messaging which makes it harder for them to make decisions. Instead, keep your messaging simple, relatable, and focused in order to speak directly to their needs and business priorities.
This type of personalized customer-centric messaging generates 40% more revenue than other messaging tactics.
Test and Optimize Your Messaging
Shifting to customer-centric messaging is an ongoing process that requires continuous refinement. A key part of this refinement is testing your messaging strategies to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Here, consider creating a feedback loop by:
- Analyzing Performance Metrics like email open rates, conversion rates, and website engagement to adjust your strategy.
- Engaging with Customers Directly through ongoing surveys, interviews, and/or feedback forms to determine whether your messaging is aligned with customer needs.
- Monitoring Marketing Trends to stay relevant and differentiate yourself from the competition.
Challenges in Shifting to Customer-Centric Messaging and How to Overcome Them
Many businesses face challenges when making the transition from product-centric to customer-centric messaging. However, with the right strategies, you can help your company overcome these hurdles and start creating more impactful, value-driven communication. Some common challenges and possible solutions include:
Challenge 1: Internal Resistance to Change
Teams that have been focused on product features for many years may be reluctant to change their approach, especially if they’ve seen success in the past. In order to get buy-in from all departments, especially sales and product teams, invite them to participate in discussions about customer pain points and goals, equip them with the skills to frame product features as solutions, and align teams around a shared vision of success. This could include highlighting the fact that companies with customer-centric messaging are 60% more profitable than those that are not.
Challenge 2: Lack of Deep Customer Insights
If you don’t have the right insights, crafting messages that resonate can be difficult. Many companies struggle with gathering and using customer data effectively. In order to combat this, make customer insights a priority by investing in customer interviews, surveys, and focus groups in order to gather qualitative feedback to which you can tailor your messaging. Additionally, creating buyer personas based on your research will make it easier to craft messaging that speaks to each group’s unique challenges.
Challenge 3: Siloed Teams and Poor Collaboration
Many companies struggle with siloed departments that don’t collaborate effectively on unified, customer-centric messaging. By encouraging regular, cross-department communication and collaboration through project management or communication tools and centering teams around the same goal–delivering value to the customer–your business can see 38% higher sales win rates. Additionally, in order to ensure consistency across channels and touchpoints, develop a set of messaging guidelines that outline key customer pain points, solutions, and benefits that your teams can reference and emphasize as they interact with the customers.
Challenge 4: Difficulty Measuring Impact
Many companies hesitate to shift because they worry about how to measure their success with customer-centric messaging. Unlike product-centric strategies, which come with clear, tangible metrics, customer-centric strategies are less straightforward to measure. By identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) that indicate customer engagement and satisfaction, continuously testing different messaging approaches to see which drives more conversions and better engagement, and tracking long-term metrics like customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value, you can turn measuring and iterating customer-centric messaging into a well-oiled machine.
Challenge 5: Balancing Features with Value
Product features and specifications still matter, especially for those in technical fields or seeking out technical products. The difficulty, though, can lie in finding the right balance between highlighting the technical features and showcasing the value they provide.
Always tie features to customer outcomes and solutions so that customers understand not only the product features but also the value your product offers. You can also consider creating two levels of messaging, one that is tailored to decision-makers by focusing on high-level benefits and the other that details the technical aspects for more hands-on users like IT managers or engineers.
For customers with multiple decision-makers, consider offering product demos, videos, or visual infographics to communicate both the technical capabilities and the value of your product.