Every Customer Marketer’s Question
When someone says “Marketing”, the immediate thing that comes to mind is the huge marketing campaigns, the gimmicks, and the guerilla efforts the company makes to attract new customers and enhance brand visibility. However, there is a small segment of marketers who are involved in marketing efforts that are customer-centric rather than brand-centric. Our tasks do not help companies be on Twitter trends instead, it helps retain loyal customers, enhance their experience, and help spread the word of mouth. We are Customer Marketers.
From the time the customer has been onboarded till they become a satisfying paying customer and way beyond throughout their life cycle, the customer marketers nourish them and work toward making their journey a smooth one. Customers are the center of any business and their well-being is in the hands of customer marketers. Analyzing their experience, collecting feedback, understanding their usage, bridging the gap between product management and customer, and building a healthy user community is the key responsibility of any customer marketer. Marketing a product without knowing what your customers are looking for is trying to shoot with the blindfolds on, hence customer marketers also bridge the gap between the customer and product marketer.
The two key responsibilities of any customer marketer are customer profiling and building a collection of customer success stories. Customer profiling helps the company to understand the composition of its customer base and plan its future activities accordingly. Customer success stories help the company to understand the pulse of the customer and their overall experience to provide feedback to product and onboarding teams, and also educate the user community to learn from their peer businesses. This enhances the customers’ experience and gives them a platform to talk about their entire journey.
In a world where buying the smallest of things requires us to take our peers’ advice and suggestions, skimming through reviews posted by the anonymous proves how important validation is for all of us. Business decisions are no less, almost 75% of businesses look at their competitors to decide which solution provider to choose. Without a doubt, this remains one of the most important factors influencing business decisions.
This is where the customer success story comes in the B2B market. While the solution provider loves to talk about how “COMPANY A” aligned its business process using the solution offered, “COMPANY A” also gains the limelight from a wider audience and a chance to inspire the community. Despite win-win results for both parties, the companies often hesitate to share their journey, believing it to be a cumbersome process. This is where the best practices of customer marketers come in. Keeping it short and making it collaborative work rather than a favor is the key here.
The most important question every customer marketer ever has is “when do I approach a customer for the case study?”__ while there is no right answer to this question, I want to share my best shots.
1. When the customer has just purchased the product — at this phase, it is always better to collect a testimonial describing their first level of experience with the product/service. This helps the marketers to collect information about their experience of the onboarding stage and the first impression of the product/service.
2. Their first upgrade/renewal (whichever is first) — this is the perfect time to understand the customer’s satisfaction level. Understanding their experience at this level is crucial since almost 60% of the customers drop out at this stage. They tend to allow the subscription to fail or never come back to upgrade because of their poor experience and start searching for a replacement. This phase should only be used to gauge their experience through surveys and provide necessary feedback to the respective teams.
3. 9 months — 13 months of their subscription — This is the best phase to reconnect with the customer and understand their journey so far and also invite them to share their success journey. This is the optimum time to gather their experience and use case for the success story. This is neither too early nor too late.
4. 2 years — 4 years — This is the ideal time to reconnect with the customer and invite them to be our advocates for several marketing activities provided you still believe they are a happy customer. Usually, this duration makes the customer a loyal customer, and also the customer tends to have stayed long enough with the company to vouch as an advocate.
5. 10 years+ — this is an ideal time to re-work the customer story. A decade is enough time to re-work the initial customer story since the story might have become much stronger now.
These constant efforts at regular intervals allow the customer marketers to be in touch with the customers and track their pulse to spot any anomaly and work towards it.
Please note: this is a very general approach and it might work wonders for you if you have a longer customer cycle. Please feel free to share your opinion in the comment section.
