Customer obsession puts the buyer first. It guides how companies communicate with them online and off. But only a few companies can truly call themselves “customer-obsessed.” According to one Forrester report, only 6% of B2B companies claim this title.

And this affects how they go about solving design problems.

Design-led companies place design at the forefront of their entire customer experience strategy. It’s not considered an afterthought. Customers are at the heart of innovation.

When there’s a breakdown between how businesses view a buyer’s experience and design, those who are customer-obsessed have a greater advantage by pinpointing precisely what is or isn’t connecting.

But where do they start? Furthermore, where should you start when you want to identify the disconnect within your company’s marketing and design?

By laying everything out and seeing if your marketing clearly states your value proposition throughout your homepage, social presence, and anywhere else, people see your brand.

Look at your current marketing

It’s easy to get into “production mode” when you’re pushing out enormous amounts of marketing content to keep up with the momentum you don’t want to lose. However, it’s harder to make sure all of these campaigns are connected, on-brand, and focused.

Which affects how your value propositions are presented.

To figure out where the issues are, start by looking at your marketing data. Are your open-and-click rates for your emails not where you want them to be? It might be time to lay out all of your email sequences together to see if your subject lines, body copy, and imagery need to be adjusted. Those creative elements could affect people’s perception of your brand.

If you can identify pages where people leave as soon as they land, you can better optimize them to give potential customers what they need to stay—and buy.

Are there areas on your product description pages that reveal that your site visitors aren’t seeing additional information because it’s hidden within tabs? This discovery could indicate that you’ll need to update the page’s design to remove the tabs and replace them with a simple grid.

Are your calls to action (CTAs) easy to find for printed marketing materials like direct mail pieces and brochures? If you have more than one, cutting back on them could lead to a higher response rate.

Data highlights problems with design that wouldn’t be immediately noticeable without it. Plus, this analysis removes any guesswork. You know what needs to change with your company’s marketing and design, so your business can improve how it visually communicates with your audience.

Listen to what customers tell you

Marketers, on average, market to three customer segments. Each provides an opportunity to learn what is—or isn’t—working for them with your marketing. And when you ask people to tell you about your brand, they’re more than happy to do it.

These insights lead to understanding how people engage with your company and use your products. They can uncover that your site’s visitors have a love-hate relationship with sliders on your homepage. Or show that customers want to see more visual use cases of high-cost products in sales materials.

Sometimes, hearing this straight from your customers creates new opportunities to give them a better experience online and offline. Because being customer-obsessed means listening to what they want from your business and acting on what they say.

Paying attention to what customers say also allows you to move closer to becoming a business that thinks through the buyer’s experience and how design impacts it.

Being customer-obsessed benefits businesses

Customer obsession is about more than the product or service, from the first touchpoint to the last. It’s about people’s interaction with your business—and its marketing.

When customers know that you’ve put them at the forefront of your communications, it leads to:

1. Increased customer loyalty: Exceptional experiences mean repeat buyers. When you consistently go above and beyond in your marketing and sales communications, customers will return for more.
2. Happier buyers: Satisfied customers are likelier to recommend businesses to family and friends. In turn, 88% of those people will have more trust in these companies, leading to new business.
3. Higher revenue: When the customers feel recognized, understood, and cared for, they’ll pay more for products and services–even when they’re more expensive. Because of this, businesses earn more throughout the lifetime of the customer relationship.

It makes sense to prioritize customer obsession by becoming a company that pairs the insatiable drive to satisfy buyers with design. All of this enables you to have conversations with consumers that run deep. And give you and your team the ability to create and design marketing campaigns that resonate with them.

Changing designs to build relationships

Customers can tell when you’re focused on their happiness. And when those same customers feel connected, these positive perceptions help them decide if they’ll continue buying from you or a competitor who can communicate their value to them.

Running a design-led, customer-obsessed business shows people how your values align with theirs. And even when you can’t have conversations with them in person, your website, emails, direct marketing pieces, and everything else should be designed to keep the discussion going.

Your design has to align with the message you want to communicate to them. It’s what attracts a customer to your brand, makes it recognizable, and solidifies the relationship with them over the long haul.

And it’s how you can deliver designs that connect with your customers.