How to build trust through your customer marketing strategy

Many B2B companies spend a large amount of their marketing budget on customer acquisition. While this is a great way to help your company grow, it isn’t the only way to keep your business and products or services top-of-mind.

One area companies often neglect to invest in is customer marketing. Making sure customers are successfully using your product or service and are satisfied after they’ve signed the contract can be a valuable way to ensure they stick around for the long haul. And many modern marketers know this.

But if you’re just learning about customer marketing, we’re here to help you understand the far-reaching benefits it can provide. In this blog, we share how you can build trust using a customer marketing strategy.

What is Customer Marketing?

Let’s start by defining customer marketing. Customer marketing is a type of marketing that’s focused on helping you keep your existing customer base engaged with your company. Rather than a transaction-based approach, customer marketing utilizes a relationship-based approach. This relationship-based approach encompasses the entire customer journey, but primarily focuses on building high-quality relationships through adoption, retention, expansion, and most importantly—advocacy.

This unique methodology helps ensure that your customers get the most value out of your products and services as possible. Delivering value over the course of a customer’s relationship with your company will drive loyalty, and ultimately, advocacy.

Marketing Automation and Customer Relationships

Marketing automation tools like HubSpot enable you to continue developing relationships and keep providing value long after the sale. Some tools even allow you to automate onboarding processes and nurturing emails, while also giving you opportunities to measure engagement. Leveraging marketing automation tools helps you better understand the needs of customers, gauge their satisfaction, and get feedback on your products or services.

Benefits of Customer Marketing

Increasing Customer Loyalty and Retention

Increased customer loyalty and retention is one of the primary goals of customer marketing. After all, you want to make the customer experience as enjoyable as possible, right? Doing so can increase the likelihood of customers being loyal to your company, increasing retention rates and driving overall success.

Turning Customers into Advocates

When you succeed at developing a loyal customer base, the next step is to turn these key customers into advocates of your brand. A loyal customer advocate will speak highly of your products and services and enthusiastically refer new customers to your company. Advocates are highly valuable because they advertise your company using one of the most trusted, effective tactics: word-of-mouth (WOM). Recent statistics show that WOM is directly responsible for 90% of all purchases, meaning now is the time to start turning your customers into advocates if you haven’t already considered it.

Collaborating Across Departments

By implementing a customer marketing strategy, you can also improve collaboration across different departments within your company, including marketing, sales, and customer support. Customer marketing requires alignment between each of these departments, and facilitating increased collaboration can bring big benefits to processes in other important areas. Overall productivity may improve over time, too, as opportunities for collaboration can provide a morale and motivation boost.

Increasing Revenue

The biggest benefit you can achieve with a successful customer marketing strategy is increased revenue. Through the careful development of relationships with existing customers, you can encourage them to continue supporting your company and reap the rewards of improved retention rates. These loyal brand advocates can help you gain additional customers through referrals and WOM, further increasing your overall revenue.

Creating the Perfect Customer Marketing Strategy

The perfect customer marketing strategy starts with a plan.

Tailor Your Marketing to Each Client

Once you have your customer marketing strategy created, it’s time to implement analytics and start using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to harness your customer data so you can develop personalized messaging. When you take the time to tailor your marketing to each client, you boost response rates. So personalize, personalize, personalize.

Track Results from the Start

Customer marketing focuses on different metrics and tactics than marketing for acquisition purposes, so it’s important to include these in your existing marketing plan to ensure they’re captured. Some customer marketing activities you may want to include in your strategy are events for existing buyers, outreach for testimonials, user groups, and others.

You’ll also want to pay attention to cross-sells and upsells to track any revenue generated from them, along with renewal (or churn rates) and overall customer satisfaction. These results can tell you a lot about what’s working and what’s not. When all of these metrics are achieving positive results, you should ultimately be seeing increased referrals from trusting, loyal brand advocates.

Finding Success with Customer Marketing

So, how does it all come together? How do you build trust with a customer marketing strategy? As we’ve touched on, focusing on delivering value throughout the entire relationship and providing a great customer experience are great starting points. Customer marketing can often be overlooked, but it can provide tremendous benefits if you invest the time and effort needed to build trust.

Ready to create your customer marketing strategy, or need support with another area of marketing? Sagefrog can help. Let’s talk!