RESOURCE CENTER

Chapter 2: How to create a customer-centric advertising strategy

Unify your customers’ identities across your technology.

TIME TO READ: 5.5 MINUTES

Bret Taylor
President, Chief Operating Officer, Salesforce

As a result of nearly endless choices in the marketplace today, customers are more demanding than ever. In fact, 72% of today’s customers expect companies to understand their needs. That’s why it’s crucial to put customer needs at the center of your business goals. With enough unified data, the right research and listening tools, and a customer-first mindset, you can create advertising journeys that relate to each customer’s interests and build trusting relationships over time.

When each customer has a unified identity across all of your marketing technology, you’ll have the information you need to build marketing strategies based on their preferences on every channel. Plus, by delivering relevant content on the right channels at the right time, you can gather interaction data to inform your marketing going forward — it’s a gift that keeps on giving for marketers and customers alike.

Think through the best experience for each customer and create a personalized journey.

Treating each customer as an individual is essential, and it’s important to be able to deliver different offers and messaging to unique audiences based on their needs. Through a customer data platform (CDP), marketers can use data to identify key traits about existing customers and use that information to generate lookalike audiences as target markets for tailored advertising.

Targeting customers on a 1-to-1 basis is a foundational part of delivering the best experiences to each customer. With a full understanding of each customer’s interests and past interactions, you can improve experiences by personalizing all of your future interactions specifically to what customers want.

Astro delivers a package to a customer at their home, while a marketer gets notified of the delivery on a mobile device

Today’s leading marketers are delivering powerful 1-to-1 contextual engagement, including campaigns personalized to topics customers care about most and suppression of ads that don't apply to certain customers — all based on a unified view of each customer’s history with the brand.

Consider your next steps.

Remember, personalized advertising and customer engagement isn’t just about single moments of connection. It’s really about creating a multistage experience that shifts, moves, and evolves based on who the customer is, the content they interact with, and what they’re interested in.

To truly drive growth with data-driven advertising, you need to have a clear plan for what your next steps are after the first customer interaction. Consider how that first engagement can be a jumping-off point for future interactions and an overall journey personalized to each customer.

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