Customer Marketing is an emerging B2B marketing practice that refers to any marketing activity or campaign aimed at your customers and not to your prospects. The overall strategy driving Customer Marketing is called Customer-led Growth, and it is already changing the way many B2B firms define, measure and achieve retention and growth.
In essence, anyone who has been practicing marketing to customers, and marketing by way of leveraging customer relationships, has been part of the founding generation of B2B’s Customer Marketers. These include a plethora of programs, such as Advocacy, References and/or Lifecycle marketing, that are typically led by Customer Marketers with varying titles, and often varying departmental leadership.
Today, we’re seeing all these programs being gradually grouped under the umbrella of customer marketing and led by marketing leaders that have designed customer-led strategies.
The main driver for the fast adoption of the customer marketing strategy is the incoming data; after almost 2 decades of focusing primarily on generating and converting demand, marketers are waking up to a less-than-2% conversion rate from organic search to qualified lead.
A focus on delivering increasing value to customers is delivering incomparable results:
Customer Marketing teams support customers throughout their entire lifecycle—from onboarding to product adoption to expansion to renewal and beyond. This translates to customers who stay longer (increasing Net Dollar Retention), use more of your product (increasing Lifetime Value) and refer more new customers (increasing New Revenue).
But comparing the impact of sales-led or inbound marketing organizations to those that are increasingly customer-led, goes far beyond just apples to apples. A remarkable new lineup of metrics has entered the marketer’s performance report and herein lies the differentiation. Guided by the Customer-led Growth strategy, customer marketers are empowered to impact north star metrics, like revenue, lifetime value and retention -and this is changing everything.
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