Hiring a Customer Marketing Manager? Look for These Backgrounds

If you’re having trouble finding someone with “Customer Marketing Manager” as their previous job title, try looking for the following:

Loyalty Manager

Often found in the B2C world, Loyalty Managers are responsible for cross-functional collaboration, customer satisfaction, and building and rewarding customer loyalty. These skills and the customer loyalty mindset translate directly to customer marketing.

Advocacy Manager or Advocate Marketing Manager

Advocate marketing is one of the main pillars of customer marketing—and can encompass a lot of things! Advocacy managers are experienced in identifying enthusiastic customers and turning them into brand champions. They’re used to running campaigns to recruit advocates, solicit user-generated content, and encourage advocates to promote the organization.

Referral Marketing Manager

Referral marketing can fall under customer marketing, acquisition, or advocacy. Referral marketers have a keen understanding of the customer lifecycle, what makes a loyal customer, and how to get those loyal customers to refer new business.

Customer Onboarding Specialist

Customer Onboarding Specialists are experts in onboarding and adoption. Because of their experience working directly with customers to implement and learn the product, they have a deep understanding of the customer lifecycle and what it takes for customers to be successful with your product. They likely have a lot of ideas of how your company can streamline and scale onboarding, adoption, and product education. 

Community Manager

Communities are having their heyday right now. More and more companies are seeing the value in creating a community for their industry and customers. Community managers bring a number of skills to the table—relationship building, content creation, project planning, experimenting with and implementing different platforms. Community managers would be great fits for your open customer marketing requirements. 

Lifecycle Marketing Manager

Lifecycle marketing is the foundation of a lot of customer marketing programs. Lifecycle marketing managers are responsible for segmentation and communication through the entire customer lifecycle. This includes automated communications for onboarding and adoption, as well as one-off communications for events and product releases.

Customer Reference Manager

Customer Reference Managers are responsible for finding happy customers and recruiting them to provide positive feedback through different mediums. This could be review sites, testimonials, case studies, customer stories, or, for Enterprise products, getting on a call with a potential customer to share their experience with your product. Because of their background running a variety of programs, Customer Reference Managers make fantastic customer marketers.  

Director of User Conferences or Customer Event Marketing Manager

User conference organizers or event marketing managers have a great background building experiences that delight customers. They know how to manage timelines and budgets, work with internal teams and external vendors, and build relationships. 

Field Marketing Manager

A subset of event marketing, field marketing managers are a combination of marketing and sales. They go out to events and organizations to give product demos, promote products, sell, and gather feedback from customers. Because of their close connection to the market and the product, field marketing managers can easily transition to the role of customer marketing.

Customer Success Manager, Customer Engagement Manager, or Account Manager

Customer Success Managers (CSMs), Customer Engagement Managers (CEMs), and Account Managers (AMs) have extensive experience with customers. They know what it means to build trust and grow a relationship. They also understand what goes into onboarding, adoption, retention, and expansion—making them a great fit for customer marketing. Because CSMs and AMs manage many 1:1 or 1:few relationships, take some time to explore any programs they’ve run or things they’ve done to scale relationships and interactions. Hat tip to Amanda Peacock, Lauren Higbee, and Jen Raphael for sharing their ideas!