Four Reasons You Need a Strong Customer Marketing Strategy

The most important thing for any B2B business to know is its customers. Only by understanding them can a customer marketing strategy be tailored in order to drive retention, loyalty, and advocacy. To the marketer, the buyer’s journey doesn’t simply taper off at the decision stage. It’s just the beginning of a relationship. 

Marketers must realize that the cost of retaining an existing customer is 30 times less than searching for a new one, all the more reason to pay attention to churn. You cannot view each customer in a vacuum – you have to view them as a piece in a bigger puzzle. Satisfied customers will cascade to referrals and reviews that’ll lead to fresh connections in the form of new customers. 

Though this cycle is an uphill struggle, you’re not alone. Read on to understand why customer marketing is so vital.

Why Customer Marketing Strategies Are Key

A customer marketing strategy is all about answering a straightforward question: how can I ensure my customers stay loyal? Don’t be deceived, though. Answering this can be an incredibly complex process, requiring time and effort. This leads us to the overwhelming question: why should companies care? 

To answer this, let’s go over four reasons why these strategies are crucial: 

Keeping Customers Happy

A happy customer is a customer that’ll drive sales. Don’t believe it? A survey conducted by Capgemini found that customers who are happy with a company tend to spend more compared to a customer who, at best, feels lukewarm. Further, it’s 70% easier to sell additional solutions to an existing customer base. With the prospect of more revenue, marketers must capitalize on this. 

One way to achieve this is to focus on building customer loyalty, which often coincides with happiness. A key step is to build rapport. Marketers should create an experience that makes their customer base feel valued. Whether it’s a casual text, email, or customer support session, you should treat each interaction as something valuable and important. Always pay full attention to whatever they say, actively listen, and provide transparent and truthful responses.

Gathering Constructive Feedback

Continual improvement is the name of the game if you want to stay competitive in the ever-evolving B2B market. To achieve this, feedback is needed to identify areas for improvement. However, remaining objective when assessing your own solutions is tricky thanks to unintentional bias. This is why obtaining constructive customer feedback is essential. 

Happy, loyal customers are more likely to provide detailed reviews and honest assessments of your solutions. Now while you should leverage the feedback received to enhance your existing solutions, the other side of the coin to note is that they’ll provide you a dose of social proof too. That said, don’t solely rely on the goodwill of the customer to provide a review. Be active in your efforts – email marketing campaigns, complimentary coupons, discounts. They’re all incentives you should use to garner feedback

Converting Customers into Brand Advocates

You might think that aggressive marketing tactics, from outreach programs to email blasts, are your most effective strategies to sell your solution, but you’d be wrong. The strongest tool in your arsenal is far more organic: your customers. By turning your customers into your brand advocates, you’ll take advantage of the fact that 90% of customers believe in referrals through friends. 

Implementing a system that promotes brand advocacy requires a creative take on incentivization. For instance, marketers could create a referral program that promotes customer-driven publicity with tangible rewards such as discounts and coupons. Alternatively, exclusive events could also be hosted, like dinners and fundraisers that are made available only to customers who participate in the referral program. Our BeatMyScaffold contest is an example of this where customers were invited to participate by submitting their designs in exchange for potential prizes!

Maintaining Relevance

Good customer marketing strategies aim to understand a customer and add value via helpful content which in turn, helps the company stay relevant. Exclusive events, vouchers, and complimentary gifts are all great ways to keep customers happy, but that’s just the icing on the cake. What B2B customers really want is knowledge relevant to their needs. 

Curating the right type of educational content as part of your strategy is just as important. Because you’re focusing on existing customers who are already invested in your solution, focus less on brand awareness and surface-level subjects. Dive deeper into your solution. Provide in-depth tips, training programs, and relevant industry-wide updates to buckle down as an industry leader. Likewise, you should also experiment with different forms of content like webinars, newsletters, e-books, and infographics in order to gauge which content your customer base prefers.

Strategy Starts Now

Above, we’ve covered why you should implement a customer-centric marketing strategy if you’re not already doing so. It will not only stimulate brand loyalty but will also turn your customer base into an effective marketing asset that’ll drive revenue while reducing churn. 

At Brighttail we design effective customer marketing strategies that are designed to deepen existing bonds and generate sales. Contact us today to find out more!

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