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Using Precision Marketing to Accelerate Revenue Growth

Precision marketing — I used this term for several years before I knew what it really meant. At first, I executed it as a customer-focused approach for marketing — aligning pain points and value propositions to buyer personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs). But, that’s only a surface-level tactic in developing go-to-marketing strategies. 

It wasn’t until I had an “ah ha!” moment that I understood the real value of precision marketing—  using it to upsell and cross-sell existing customers. It’s a successful formula when developing new products, diving into new markets, or selling to new and existing buyers. 

What is Precision Marketing?

Look no further than Wikipedia for a great explanation:

“Precision marketing is a marketing technique that suggests successful marketing is to retain, cross-sell and upsell existing customers.

Precision marketing emphasizes relevance as part of the technique. To achieve Precision Marketing, marketers solicit personal preferences directly from recipients. They also collect and analyze behavioral and transactional data. “

(Side note: I’ve always wanted to cite Wikipedia since academia told me it’s not a scholarly source. But look, we’re not in school…so there!)

In the real-world, you can think of precision marketing like how loyalty programs work. Think hotel/airline points, credit card reward points, or a local coffee punch card where you get a free coffee after so many purchases. 

What do all these examples have in common? Their goal is to keep a consumer coming back for more, and often expanding purchases across multiple products. And they do that by studying and understanding their customer behaviors.

  • How do customers buy? 
  • What do they buy?
  • When do they buy?
  • How often do they buy?

Studying your customer behaviors and trends will provide insight into how to acquire new customers in a precise and value-driven way. 

Understanding Your Customer Behaviors

How you build your customer success team and processes can determine how well you’re able to observe and capture your customer behaviors, trends, usage/insights, and more. And you need to keep this consistent pulse on your customers to succeed at precision marketing. 

Your customer makeup will constantly change. You will inevitably onboard different customers who use your product or service to solve different problems within their business. Understanding your customer pain points and value propositions are not a one-time “set it and forget it” practice; they should evolve as your customer behaviors evolve. 

You can use my tips to build a buyer-centric customer success program that will capture your customer behaviors so you can adapt with them. 

How to Execute Precision Marketing and Accelerate Revenue Growth  

Quick recap: we’ve covered that precision marketing is made up of two parts: 

  1. Selling and reselling to existing customers
  2. Understanding your customer behaviors and insights

Now, let’s see how you can pull these parts together and apply them to new customer acquisition to accelerate your revenue. 

When you start your business, you rely heavily on your ideal customer profiles (ICPs), buyer personas, and pain point/value proposition mapping. These will either be hypothetical, briefly customer tested, or researched from competing products. The goal is to launch your product or service with intent; so, you figure out who the buyers will be and ensure you’re offering a compelling value proposition that solves their problems. 

And as you onboard customers, you should continue to test your theories and refine your outputs (pain points, value propositions, customer usage data, etc). By establishing this methodology in your customer success program, you can consistently track the right data to understand how your product or service is solving your customer problems. 

With your tracked customer behaviors and insights, you then can apply it to your new customer acquisition strategies. And as you do, you might start seeing similarities of: 

  • Customer segmentation profiles: certain industries, size of customers/users, user personas, etc
  • Customer data points: customer ramp time, adoption rate, usage statistics
  • Use cases: customer problems being solved, unintended benefits, validation of satisfaction, etc 

Then, you can add these to your outreach process for new customers like:

  • Taking this insight and using it in marketing to find similar prospects
  • Having your sales team use that insight in cold outreach and during discoveries and product demos
  • Creating messaging in sales and marketing that aligns to buyer pain points, buyer satisfaction, and buyer success stories

What’s the result? Revenue acceleration! Because you’re aligning your teams around the needs of your buyers and revenue growth. 

Precision marketing is a repeatable process that has purpose and intent while constantly aligning your messaging to your buyers. Keeping a pulse on your customers is required; but using that pulse to fuel your customer acquisition is a game changer!

Ed Porter | Fractional Chief Revenue Officer