Give More Attention to Your E-Commerce Customer Experience and Google Will Reward You
If you’re looking to increase your website traffic and improve your search engine rankings, technical SEO is no longer the only way to do it. With Google’s recent shift to AI, focusing on customer intimacy strategy has become an effective alternative. In this article, we will discuss what customer intimacy is, customer intimacy examples, and how to improve your e-commerce customer experience by implementing a customer intimacy strategy.
Why Should You Understand Your Customers?
Google’s AI focuses on personalization for the searcher, factoring in things such as their location and the intent behind their search queries. In other words, these days, Google is starting to get to know customers more than marketers are.
But, if you discover your buyers’ intent and learn what their needs and wants are, you can better use this knowledge to tailor your offerings and marketing efforts to them. The more relevant you make your products and services to your customers, the more likely Google will notice and rank you higher for it.
Through this method of “customer intimacy,” brands can grow their organic traffic, finding success in keyword rankings without necessarily relying on technically optimizing their content.
What is Customer Intimacy?
Customer intimacy is a marketing strategy that focuses on understanding and prioritizing customer needs so you can tailor your products to them. The result is a better e-commerce customer experience and higher rankings on the SERPs, as Google wants to showcase websites that provide what searchers are looking for.
There are five key components that should drive your customer intimacy strategy:
- Do the right research.
- Understand your customers’ buying process.
- Know what information your customers need and how they look for it.
- Identify the questions your customers ask.
- Build and update knowledge about your customer base.
Buyer Personas
One way to develop your customer intimacy strategy is by creating a buyer persona, a fictional representation of your ideal customer. By doing this, you can get an idea of your customers’ demographics, attitudes, motivations, goals, observations, questions, selling points, and even search queries.
Let’s look at an example of a fictional buyer persona: Melanie Martin. Pretend you run a digital marketing agency, and Melanie is an e-commerce manager for a lifestyle apparel brand for traveling businesswomen looking for services you offer. Here are some of the traits you may want to include in her buyer persona:
- Attitudes – “We’ll be able to grow more with the help of an agency that has had success working with clients like us.”
- Goals – “Increase sales and bring in resources that can relieve our team’s current marketing efforts.”
- Observations – “Our competitors have much more sophisticated digital marketing campaigns.”
- Questions – “When will we start seeing results from added marketing efforts?”
- Selling Points – “The agency we work with should have experience working with similar clients and guarantee results.”
- Sample Search Queries – “Facebook ad agency, e-commerce SEO agencies.”
As you can see, all of these traits will be based on your research on your customer base, which is why it’s important to invest considerate time into the research phase of your customer intimacy strategy. Keeping your business’s buyer persona in mind can inform all departments of your organization, from marketing to product development. This strategy will allow you to connect to real customers who fit this model easily, thus successfully creating and building customer intimacy.
Integrating Customer Intimacy in Marketing
To successfully create and build customer intimacy, businesses should consider what it should look like with the business’s branding, content, and overall marketing strategy.
- Branding: Focus on strengthening your brand in a way that is unique to you and valuable to the audience you care about.
- Content: Sometimes, your customers may just want information, not a product, so your business should be in a position to answer their questions in the form of blogs or other content.
- Marketing: Create a marketing strategy that targets different parts of your audience based on your research and planned buyer personas.
Case Study: Matching Content to Customer Search Intent
One of the best customer intimacy examples that should influence your strategy is an eCommerce candle store that specializes in creating handmade natural candles and fair trade gifts. The owners of the online store wanted to grow a larger, more organic audience for their products.
First, they researched the search intent behind various keywords and created pages based on what searchers were looking for. For example, if the links found on the first search result page were blogs, would make the same type of page for that specific keyword.
They also analyzed user behavior flow to identify which pages the consumer browsed before deciding to make a purchase and added similar information to the original landing page to support customers’ purchase decisions.
Customer Intimacy Will Change Your Business
Google cares about your relationship with your customers. By creating a customer intimacy strategy, you can get to know your customers better, tailor your offerings and marketing efforts to them, and rank higher on SERPs.
If you’re looking for an expert customer intimacy strategy to boost sales by putting your customers first, check out our eCommerce SEO services and our Authority First approach to eComm SEO:
- Website Visitor Engagement
- Positive Reviews (Reputation)
- Customer Relationships (Influence)
