Creating a Customer-centric Brand for 2020 To ensure your company stays competitive, it's imperative to keep customers at the forefront of your business strategy

Many start-ups and businesses are born when entrepreneurs identify a gap in the current marketplace and create a business that can leverage off how their competitors aren't fulfilling their product or service to the fullest degree. Maybe it's modernizing an old-school approach or simply providing more to customers in a financially viable way—there's no doubt that identifying where there's room for business growth in a sector is vital to the potential success for entrepreneurs.

The key is to use your size to your advantage. If you're going to compete with big businesses, you have to embrace being underestimated and find the holes in their marketing and execution strategy. In 2019, we're seeing that customers want personalized products and services cheaper and faster, so to take market share, you have to compete on your own level and not over-sell your offering.

As the market evolves, it's more important than ever to keep your customers front of mind in your business strategy. For creating a customer-centric brand in 2020, consider these below.

Invest in Google Ads and Facebook Ads

This will help make customers aware of your business and ensure you're targeting a large portion of your already interested market through the advanced ad targeting systems online. Make sure you're getting the most from your ad spend by zeroing in on your target market.

Offer Services Your Competitors Don't

It could be free shipping, a low-level audit or a thank you note after project completion. When you continue to add and evolve your services, you're proactively setting the standard in your market.

Turn Customers into Raving Fans

Send them personal emails, send them discount codes on their birthday and reward loyalty. When customers feel special and valued, your community grows and gives you the best chance possible for returning customers, while also converting fans into first time buyers.

Keep Costs Down

Most business coaches tell you to hire staff early and outsource. Yet in the quest for greatness, stay humble. Understand that there's no job too small for an emerging CEO, and you're never too busy to roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty. Not only will this attitude solidify a hard-working community spirit within your company, but it will show your customers that the organisation as a whole, values everyone as equals.

Know your customer-centric key areas

The five key areas where you can outshine your competitors include trust, speed, branding, customer service and cost. Ensuring that a customer-centric mindset is being implemented into these areas will set your brand apart from the rest in the mind of the consumer. Breaking down the touch points that your customer has with these separate areas will give you a clear idea in the ways that your business needs to be improving to ramp up their customer-centric focus.

To ensure your company stays competitive, it's imperative to keep customers at the forefront of your business strategy. With the entrepreneurial ventures that have done this well from the beginning, we can see globally how successful their endeavours have been. In a market where a customer-centric mindset is not being considered by our biggest competitors, swoop in now and grow your brand beyond a name and become customer-centric.