Invest in your customer marketing channel for better products and customer experiences—here’s how.
You all remember the funnel right? The marketing funnel?
SiriusDecisions launched its first version of the popular way of envisioning the demand generation process back in 2002. Twenty years later, they’ve updated their vision considerably to reflect the fact that people don’t just follow a single path in their buying process.
There’s also been another, considerable change:
/ Keep in mind
Once someone becomes a customer, marketing doesn’t stop—it just changes.
The reality is more like this: Customer acquisition gives you customers to market to—you can cross-sell or upsell, and much more.
We’re going to dive into the three main benefits of establishing a more effective customer marketing program for your software company and how you can set that up. Let’s dig in.
Benefits of a robust customer marketing program
1. Customer marketing reduces churn
Even for the best, top-of-the-line, product-led growth organizations, finding and then implementing enterprise-level software is a tedious, time-consuming process that involves multiple teams and a whole bunch of moving parts.
Customers have to:
Make a business case
Identify potential solutions
Go through the demo and sales process
Purchase your product
Integrate it into their systems…
…only to have to go through that all again. The reasons that customers churn comes down to a few factors: internal ones at their organization (budgets, change in leadership, etc.) or, more importantly, the pain of staying with your product exceeds the pain of going through that long process all over again.
Since we can’t really help when things change on the customer side, we’re only going to focus on the things we can control: making customers understand the value of staying with your product.
If you are in communication with your customers/clients through a consistent, organized customer marketing communication program, you can make it an easy decision for them to stick with you. By going out of your way to be relentlessly helpful, you can push your company to be more customer-centric and subsequently, more profitable than those that aren’t.
/ What does this look like in action?
Always be in touch with your customers: Share product updates, new releases, and new features, and make sure they always know exactly how much value they’re getting out of your partnership.
Understand your internal customer: As a field marketer, the sales team is your internal customer, but as a customer marketer, it's client success that is your internal customer. Work with them in a lock-step motion to drive the success of your programs.
Leverage the right tools: With thousands of martech tools on the market, there’s a tool for every scenario you might encounter, whether that’s tracking customer satisfaction or training and support. While technology can’t make an effective customer marketing program, it can certainly help you when you’re running with a team of one.
Focus on the fundamentals: Sure, you can have elaborate customer marketing programs that cover every moment from year one through five… but you can’t do that all at once. First, nail the fundamentals and ensure everyone is aligned. Otherwise, there’s no point in doing any of those big plans. Once again, this holds especially on a team of one.
Why this is important is borne through in the numbers: Constant communication with your customers has been shown to both reduce time to value and increase adoption rates.
Need help managing your marketing tasks? Hire an agency that supports these needs without adding a full-time equivalent.
2. Customer marketing improves your product roadmap
The customer may not always be right about everything. Whether or not they should or shouldn’t have gotten a particular email is always one that comes to mind.
However, if they’re right about one thing most of the time it’s this: features.
Your customers know what they want your product to do better than you do. They’ve hired it to do a specific job and while you might have a vision of what you want it to do, you absolutely need to understand what your customers want it to do as well.
Acquisition-focused marketing is centered around talking at your audience and focusing on the ways that your product can improve their day-to-day. Customer marketing, on the other hand, is just as focused on listening as it is on talking.
/ What does this look like in action?
Community building and participation: You don’t have to make your own proprietary community. Just be active where your prospects and customers hang out and meet them where they are.
Increase marketing’s role in calls: Have your customer marketing join at minimum five to seven calls a week, including prospect and customer calls. Sometimes they can play a significant role in the call, and sometimes they add value to a small portion of the overall strategy.
Educate and enable employees: This is employee advocacy 101. You don’t need a 100% adoption rate all of the time. If you’re able to get 20, 30, or 50 employees active on social media and talking about your business in an authentic way, you can have exponential results in growing your brand.
Infuse all insights back into the business: Just completing all of the above doesn’t do anyone any good if you don’t turn around and use those insights to make your business better.
If you don’t have a great tool for recording calls, there are tons of exceptional tools on the market that can help record, transcribe, and collate whole libraries' worth of customer and prospect calls.
3. Engage and support your customers and advocates to create brand loyalty
The way we buy products today is entirely different than it was just a few short years ago.
People aren’t going to sift through the thousands of available options or spend dozens of hours on review sites whittling down their list to find the perfect fit.
Their process is going to look like this:
Ask friends, colleagues, and their community
Identify the top three to five results
Figure out which are likely in their price range
Demo three or so
Choose
The place you can capitalize is being top of mind for friends and communities. But how do you go about turning your customers into advocates?
Whether you call it Dark Social or plain old word of mouth, the way your customers talk about you can be one of the most effective channels to drive impact at scale. You are missing out if you aren't empowering your top customers to make them advocates through specific VIP programs.
/ What does this look like in action?
Use voice-of-customer data in your copy: Take the actual words your customers are leaving in reviews (good or bad) and break those reviews into categories of responses. From there, summarize the response and reasons they chose you. Now, you have a library of quotes and words to help write copy for ads, emails, the website, and for your sales and customer success teams.
Join customer calls: I know we’ve already covered this above but it bears repeating. Joining prospect and customer calls and listening intently is the best way to build relationships with customers, understand what is important to them, and then use that information to give them what they’re asking for or something they don’t even realize they need.
Just ask: I’m surprised how often this works. When you’ve done all of the other steps in this guide, you’ve likely been in close contact with your customers and demonstrated your value again and again. So at that point, the easiest path forward is to just ask if there’s anyone else they can think of that could benefit from your product.
If you’re operating with a limited headcount, using social listening software can be a huge assistance in aggregating all of the noise that can be present on social media networks.
Customer marketing is a must
Customer marketing used to be a “nice to have." But now it’s an imperative.
To recap, a solid customer marketing program can help:
Reduce churn: Churn happens because it’s become more painful to stay than it is to leave. Customer marketing can help boost adoption, reduce time-to-value, and increase the results of using your product.
Improve CLV (customer lifetime value): Talking with customers rather than just talking at them gives you a better way to build your product roadmap to actually reflect the things your users want rather than what you think they need.
Drive acquisition: When your customers’ friends and colleagues ask, “what do you use for X?” make it so yours is the name they drop.
Read more of Nick’s insights for Capterra here: